Let's chat about file sizes. High resolution images and videos in chats are an absolute necessity for the full chat experience, but they also come with some downsides. Most importantly: costs 🤕. As always, we at CometChat work hard to give you all the building blocks you need to create a wonderful chat experience, but we're also looking out for your and your user's operating costs. That's why we're introducing our Thumbnail Generation Extension.

Large file sizes mean large costs

Over the last few years, the screens and cameras on our phones and laptops have improved dramatically and with them the file sizes of images and videos have steadily gone up. Quite often it's an absolute blessing to have these clear, crisp images to share. But sometimes...

Let's say you're on a slow connection, downloading high resolution images and videos can just take too long. Especially when you're trying to take part in a quick moving conversation at the same time. And if your users are using cellular data, the cost of downloading them can quickly spiral out of control, especially in group apps where hi-res pictures and videos get thrown around a lot. Don't forget either that every download requires CometChat bandwidth as well, which you pay for.

Focus on what's important

The reality of the situation is that a lot of these images aren't worth the bandwidth they consume. They get a cursory glance and are quickly discarded. That's why we're introducing a clever new extension that should help both you and your user save on bandwidth and keep costs down, without sacrificing the images that are worth saving. Our new Thumbnail Generation Extension lets you first render a compressed, low resolution preview of the image or video and only downloads the full, high-resolution version after the user clicks it. It's a quick and clever solution that'll save both you and your users money.

Thumbnail Generation done easy

CometChat wouldn't be CometChat if we hadn't found a clever way to make it extra easy for you. Basically, you only have to enable the Thumbnail Generation Application in your CometChat console and the extension will automagically generate metadata for a small, medium, or large thumbnail:

"@injected": {
"extensions": {
"thumbnail-generation": {
"url_small": "https://data-eu.cometchat.io/...png",
"url_medium": "https://data-eu.cometchat.io/...png",
"url_large": "https://data-eu.cometchat.io/...png"
}
}
}

And that's it.

For users in areas with slower internet connections, this will greatly help their users in saving time and bandwidth, while still allowing them to be a part of the entire conversation.

We hope you'll try it out and let us know how it works for you!

Don't forget, you can always create a free account and get a look at what's waiting for you with CometChat.