An enterprise web solution is inherently complex. Its endless integrations with various applications that are added or loaded off as per the changing requirements, multiple front-ends that provide varied and personalised digital experiences, the cultural nuances catered to in its l10n editions, the time-zone differences that are to be taken care of, etc., etc., are the most basic parts that add to the complexity.

Continuous investment, development and deployment are part and parcel of such a solution. Even so, it becomes amiable only if the complexity is masked out in the simplicity of the consumer touch points.

Two separate sets of consumers should be considered there. One is the enterprise consumers, the content creators and marketers, who are the immediate benefactors of the solution. The second, a more prominent set, is the customers to whom the enterprises cater.

Drupal, the platform for building a digital experience, invested heavily in satisfying the end customers. That was what Drupal agencies were doing all these years. They got an exoskeleton on which they built the end-user experiences. But what about the enterprise consumers themselves? Weren’t they the ones who ultimately decided to ditch or continue using the services? How good were their experiences sans the involvement of a hired developer?

The decision to simplify the touch points of enterprise consumers is a development and design decision. These content creators and marketers will benefit the most from the Starshot Initiative. It supports the marketing team by reducing the go-to-market time and eases the content creators by providing the most valuable tools out of the box. A complex solution is now draped in a simple cassock.

The first story I’m sharing today concerns Drupal’s new brand strategy and future directions. The Starshot Initiative manifests this strategy and the direction the project is taking. An interview with Shawn Perritt, Senior Director of Brand & Creative at Acquia, shines a light on this brand refresh. Read Shawn’s conversation with Alka Elizabeth, our sub-editor.

Montreal became the hub for tech talks in the past week. We conducted one-question interviews with three featured speakers at Evolve Drupal Montreal. Kazima Abbas, our sub-editor, spoke with Josh Koenig, co-founder of Pantheon, Joe Kwan, Manager of Web Development at the University of Waterloo, and the formidable Mike Herchel, Senior Front-end Developer at Agileana. Their answers form part of the feature published here.

Kazima also conducted an exclusive interview with Baddý Sonja Breidert, CEO and Co-Founder of 1xINTERNET. The interview focused on the agency’s support for the Starshot Initiative based on its experience with ‘Try Drupal’, which implements a default Drupal deployment for enterprises. It explains why they did not wait or hesitate to offer all-out support for the new initiative.

Alka Elizabeth and Ben Peter Mathew, our community manager, had jointly covered the Starshot Session on ‘Strategic Milestones in Product Definition’ led by Dries Buytaert and Cristina Chumillas on June 7. The report can be read here.

The next two stories are our signature stories, written by our founder and lead, Anoop John, CTO of Zyxware Technologies. From the start, Anoop was vocal about ‘DrupalCollab’, an idea he had been nurturing for years. As part of the initiative, he has published a list of the largest 500+ cities in the world with a sizable population of people tagged ‘Drupal developers’ on LinkedIn. You can read the analysis here. The second story published with this list is, On Using LinkedIn to Analyze the Size of the Drupal Community, an article on the methodology for this analysis using LinkedIn, associated errors and justifications. Based on these stories, Anoop is trying to build momentum to restart local Drupal meetups in as many cities as possible. Also, read his LinkedIn article on the initiative here.

Mautic 5.1 Andromeda Edition was released last week with major updates. Read our report here. We published a quick review of the Drupal Quick Exit Module developed by Oomph Inc. Ben Peter Mathew spoke with Alyssa Varsanyi of Oomph to produce this report.

To ensure brevity, I shall list the rest of the important stories below without much ado.

That is for the week, dear readers. I wish you all a very sacred Eid Ul Adha. Let the festival of sacrifice be a time to ponder the things we are ready to give up for the better common good.

To get timely updates, follow us on LinkedIn, Twitter and Facebook. Also, join us on Drupal Slack at #thedroptimes.

Thanks and regards.

Sincerely,
Sebin A. Jacob,
Editor-in-Chief, The DropTimes

Today we are talking about AI Tips for Drupal Devs, AI Best Practices, and Drupal Droid with guest Mike Miles. We’ll also cover AI interpolator as our module of the week.

For show notes visit: www.talkingDrupal.com/455

• Top 5 tips
  • Idea Generation (Ideation)
  • Code Generation
  • Debugging
  • Content Generation
  • Technical Explanations
• How do you suggest people use AI for Ideation
• Is MIT Sloan using AI to help with Drupal Development
• Does that code get directly inserted into your sites
• What are some common pitfalls
• Is your team using AI for debugging
• Any best practices you have found helping when working with AI
• Is MIT Sloan using AI for content generation
• What is an example of how you use AI for technical explanations
• What is your view ont he future of AI in Drupal, do you think AI will replace Drupal developers

• Drupal Droid
• Talking Drupal - Drupal Droid
• Workflows of ai
• AI guidelines
  • https://ist.mit.edu/ai-guidance
  • https://mitsloanedtech.mit.edu/ai/
• Using AI as a Development Tool
• Drupal Starshot: Delivering on a promise to Ambitious Site Builders

Michael Miles - mike-miles.com mikemiles86

Nic Laflin - nLighteneddevelopment.com nicxvan John Picozzi - epam.com johnpicozzi Randy Fay - rfay

Martin Anderson-Clutz - mandclu.com mandclu

• Brief description:
  • Have you ever wanted to use AI to help populate entity fields that were left blank by Drupal content authors? There’s a module for that.
• Module name/project name:
  • AI Interpolator
• Brief history
  • How old: created in Sep 2023 by Marcus Johansson of FreelyGive
  • Versions available: 1.0.0-rc4
• Maintainership
  • Actively maintained, recent release in the past month
  • Security coverage - opted in, needs stable release
  • Test coverage
  • Documentation - User guide
  • Number of open issues: 18 open issues, none of which are a bugs
• Usage stats:
  • 94 sites
• Module features and usage
  • In scientific fields, interpolation is the process of using known data to extrapolate or estimate unknown data points. In a similar way this module helps your Drupal site provide values for fields that didn’t receive input, based on the information that was provided.
  • Fundamentally Interpolator AI provides a framework and an API, and then relies on companion modules for processing, either by leveraging third-party services like AI LLMs, or PHP-based scripting.
  • There are existing integrations with a variety of AI services, including OpenAI, Dreamstudio, Hugging Face, and more.
  • You can add retrievers to help extract and normalize the content you’re processing, for example photos from an external site, and other tools to help normalize and optimize content and media, and optimize any prompts you will be using with AI services.
  • You can also extend the workflow capabilities of AI Interpolator, for example using the popular and powerful ECA module that we’ve talked about before on this show.

In the previous article of this guide we covered the concept of responsive images and some of the challenges that come with implementing an effective system for them. In this article we will go in detail about the concept of "Art Direction" and how this applies to responsive images.

What is art direction?

In the context of responsive images, art direction is the ability to display differently-cropped images based on the device size. For example, a large landscape shot of a person rowing in the middle of a lake is shown when viewed on a large desktop device. If we were to use the same image on a mobile device, that image would shrunk down, making the person in the image very small and hard to see. A better option would be to show a different version of the image that zooms in and focuses on the most important part of the image, the person rowing. See an example of this image below.

Enter the <picture> HTML element

In order to achieve art direction we need to be able to query for the size of the device being used to view the website. Once we've identified the device size we instruct the browser which image to use based on the device size. This will allow us to provide a better user experience as each device will display an image intended specifically for that device. Going back to the image above, we can see that the main image has been cropped differently to ensure the most important part of the image is displayed on each divice.

So how do we query for the device size and how do we instruct the browser which image to use? This is where the <picture> element/tag comes in. Let's take a look at the code that makes all this possible and break it down.

Note: The order in which the media queries are written within the <picture> tag matters. The browser will use the first match it finds even if it's not the intended one. Therefore, consider the media query order very carefully to ensure the right image is served.

• <picture>: The <picture> tag is simply a wrapper. On its own it does not do anything.
• <source>: The <picture> HTML element contains zero or more <source> elements. The browser will consider each child <source> element and choose the best match among them. If no matches are found—or the browser doesn't support the <picture> element—the URL of the <img> element's src attribute is selected. The selected image is then presented in the space occupied by the <img> element.
• Within the <source> element, you will find some very handy attributes (media, srcset, and type):
  • media: Rembember earlier we said we need to query for the device size? Well, within the media attribute you can write media queries much like the media queries you write in CSS (media="(min-width: 600px)"). This is how we check the size of the device when a page is rendered.
  • srcset: This attribute allows us to provide a list of images the browser can use when the media query finds a match (srcset="img-768.jpg, img-1440.jpg").
  • type: The type attribute specifies a MIME type for the resource URL(s). This is optional if using common image types such as JPG, PNG, TIFF, etc. If you plan on providing images in different file formats, you can do so using the type attribute. This is handy in the event the browser does not support a specific file type (type="image/avif"), as you can then provide a supported file type.
• <img>: The img element serves two purposes:
  • It describes the dimensions of the image and its presentation
  • It provides a fallback in case none of the offered <source> elements are able to provide a usable image.

And there you have it. The <picture> element is a great way to serve different images based on things like device size or screen density. When the <picture> element was first introduced it required a pollyfill as not all browsers supported it. Nowadays, unless you are supporting Internet Explorer 11 (sorry bro), all other major browsers provide native support for it. Take a look at the chart below for current browser support.

Great! Let's use <picture> on all our images ...NOOOOOOOO!!!!!!

Say what? If the <picture> element is so great, why can't we use it for rendering all of our images? Well, as great as the <picture> element is, it should not be the default solution for serving responsive images in your site. The only use case for the <picture> element is when you are trying to achieve "Art Direction" (cropping your images differently for each device size).

Remember at the begining of this post when I said "In order to achieve art direction we need to be able to query for the device size. Once we've identified the device size we instruct the browser which image to use..."? There lies the problem. Let me explain.

The issue with the statement above is that "we are telling the browser which image". Not only that, but we are doing so solely based on the size of the device. This may not always be the best way to determine which image a device should use. Imagine you are using a nice relatively new laptop with a super high density screen. Based on our rules established within the <picture> element code snippet above, we would end up with an image that is 4800px in size. This is a pretty large image but it's the one that meets our creteria defined in the media query above. If you're home with a decent wifi connection you will never see any issue loading an image this large, but imagine you are working out of a coffee shop, or at a conference with poor wifi connection, or worse yet, you're on the road using your phone as a hotspot and your signal is very bad, now you will really experience some performance issues because we are telling the browser to load the largest image possible because your computer screen is big (relatively speaking). With the <picture> element we can't check how fast your internet connection is, or whether there are browser preferences a user has configured to account for slow internet speeds. We are basing everything on the size of the device.

Then why use the picture element? Well, when developing a website, the developer does not have all the information they need to serve the best image. Likewise, when rendering a page and using the <picture> tag, the browser does not know everything about the environment. The table below shows this in more detail and exposes the gap between the developer and the browser.

Identifying the gap when using <picture>

You may be wondering: "Why did you get us all excited about the <picture> element if we can't really use it?" well, if you are trying to achieve art direction, then you use the <picture> element. It's the recommended approach for that use case. If you are looking for resolution switching, a use case for most images in the web, you need to use the srcset and sizes attributes approach. In the next post we'll dive deep into this technique.

Navigate posts within this series

• < Responsive images in Drupal - a guide
• Image resolution switching using srcset and sizes attributes >

In a nutshell, responsive image styles are a collection of image styles. It can be confusing because the similarities in their names, but responsive image styles are a bundle that holds one or more image styles.

What's the use of responsive image styles?

If you read the posts about the <picture> element as well as the one about srcset and sizes attributes, we discussed that whether you are doing art direction or resolution switching, we need to provide the browser with a collection of images to serve to different devices. In Drupal the way we provide the collection of images is by using responsive image styles.

Naming responsive image styles

In the previous post we went in detail about best practices for naming image styles. Properly naming responsive image styles is just as important but there are some differences in guidelines. While naming image styles is mostly based on the characteristics of the images (aspec ratio, orientation, dimensions), naming responsive image styles is typically based on their use case. Let's take a look at some examples.

Let's say we are building a photo gallery where we will use a series of images to display as a slider or photos grid. We may not be as concerned about the images aspect ratio or dimentions because we already have image styles in place to handle that. We're only interested on how the images will be used. In this example the use case is a Gallery. So a name for the responsive image style that makes sense to me would be Gallery or Photo gallery. Another example would be creating a responsive image style for your website's hero component. Regardless of what the images dimensions are, the responsive image style can be called Hero. Both of these examples are for very unique use cases, but there are also cases for more common type of responsive images styles such as a listing of news articles or events, a featured news article or a page for team member photos. In these cases, we can use names that we can reuse elsewhere. Something like Person listing, News full, Content grid, or 16:9 (Max 460px).

Back to hands-on exercises

We are going to create a new responsive image style in which we will make use of the image styles we created in the previous post. Let's pretend the images we are targeting will be used for displaying News and Events listings (Similar to this, and example below).

Most websites use patterns that they repeat across their sections or pages. The news listing example above is a pattern that can be used for not only displying news articles, but maybe also events, social media posts, and more. This is great because identifying these patterns can help us create better image styles and responsive image styles that are reusable. This is what I meant in the previous post when I said that if you are fortunate enough to have designs for your project, you will be able to identify these patterns right away. Let's keep this in mind as we get back into exercise mode.

Resolution switching

Here's where all of our knowledge about <picture> (art direction) and srcset and sizes (resolution switching) comes in handy. We'll start with resolution switching because art direction requires additional tooling and configuration.

In Drupal 8 we used the Picture and Breakpoints contrib modules to handle responsive images. Starting with Drupal 9, Drupal provides the "Responsive image" core module which means we don't need to install any contrib modules. Responsive image is not enabled by default.

1. Enable the Responsive image core module (/admin/modules)
2. Once enabled, head over to /admin/config/media/responsive-image-style to begin creating our first responsive image style
3. Click Add responsive image style
4. Type Content grid as the label for the responsive image style
5. Select *Responsive image from the Breakpoint group dropdown
6. Scroll down and select a Fallback image style (16:9 (Max 320px))
7. Expand the 1x Viewport Sizing [] fieldset
8. Under Type, chose Select multiple image styles and use the sizes attribute
9. Under Sizes type the following: (max-width:640px) 100vw, 30vw (I'll explain shortly)
10. Under Image styles select the image styles we created before
11. Scroll down and click Save

Let's go over everything we just did

Since we are doing resolution switching and not art direction, we chose Responsive image from the Breakpoint group dropdown. Doing so presents to us the 1x Vieport Sizing [] screen with the following options:

• Type: Again, since we are doing resolution switching, the obvious choice here is Select multiple image styles and use the sizes attribute. The other two options are irrelevant in this particular example.
• Sizes: The Sizes option is where we tell the browser how big/small our images should be rendered in relation to the viewport being used. Depending on our goal, this field accepts a single value or a media query with some conditions. Let's say we wanted our images to always render at full width regardless of the device being used (like a Hero image for example), then the value for the Sizes field would be 100vw (100% the viewport width). In our case however, we want the image to display full width, but only if the viewport/device is not larger than 640px, otherwise, meaning if the viewport/device is larger than 640px, we want the image to display at 30% the viewport width. We could had also used a pixel-based value such as 400px for example.
• Image styles: This is where we choose the image styles we want to make available for the browser to pick from. Think of this as the srcset attribute in the <img> tag.
• Fallback image: We pick a fallback image in case all the above fails.

Very important: Remember in the Image resolution switching using srcset and sizes attributes post, our claim was that it's better to let the browser pick the best image possible as the browser is smarter than us? This is exactly what we are doing here. We are providing the browser with a collection of images to pick from. Each image provides its dimensions. Then we tell the browser how big/small we want the images to be rendered. One thing we are not doing is telling the browser which image to use, we let the browser make that decision. This is the complete opposite of what we do when we use <picture>. As a reminder, the method used above is what you would do in most of your images. This is like the default configuration for your responsive images. Only when you need to crop your images differently for each device size is when you would use the art direction approach.

Navigate posts within this series

• < Image styles in Drupal
• Responsive images and Media >

Now that we've gone over some very important concepts of responsive images (art direction and resolution switching), it's time to transfer all that knowledge and put it all in practice in Drupal. One of the key pieces for achieving responsive images in Drupal is by using image styles. Image styles are how Drupal manages the way we crop and size images.

What are image styles?

Before we get to building image styles, let's go over what they are. Think of image styles as templates for cropping, scaling, converting, and sizing images. You can use these templates with any image on your site and as many times as you'd like. Thanks to image styles images will always render within the parameters we define.

A more real-world way of looking at image styles may be if you could imagine for a moment you have a couple of picture frames you'd like to use to hang some pictures in your house or office. One frame is 5x7, another is 4x6 and one last one is 8x10. The picture frames are Drupal's image styles.

So we have some picture frames and we have ordered several pictures from our favorite online photo printing service. There is one picture in particular I really love and I want to frame it using the 3 picture frames. So, although it is the same picture, I ordered different sizes of it (one for each frame size), and this will allow me to hang the 3 pictures in different sizes, aspect ratios and orientation. That in a nutshell are image styles.

Image styles best practices

Image styles are actually pretty easy to create but unfortunately because of this they can be misused or mismanaged. If not done properly, you may end up with a lot more image styles than you really need or image styles that are not well define and do no provide the outcome you are looking for. To avoid this, let's go over best practices for creating image styles which will result in less image styles to manage. Mind you, these are my best practices but I have to admit, they have worked very well for me.

Naming image styles

Have you heard the phrase "naming things is hard"? It's true. Unfortunately when it comes to image styles, if not named properly you can get yourself in a lot of trouble. Quick example, let's say I want to create an image style that I'd like to use on images of news articles that are displayed on the homepage. One might think a good name for the image style may be something like "Homepage news article images". It doesn't seem so bad but let me point out a few issues with this name:

• The image style is limited to the homepage
• It is limited to news article images
• It lacks information about the image dimensions or aspect ratio

One objective with image styles is to create them in a way that they are reusable. The more reusable an image style is the less image styles you will need to create which in turn becomes easier to manage. The main issue with the image style above ("Homepage news article images"), besides the 3 bullet points we called out, is that is not reusable. The name of it limits us to only use it on the homepage and only for news article images. If we want to display similar images elsewhere, we would need to create another image style maybe with the same parameters as the first one. You may be asking yourself, wait, why can't we use the same image style elsewhere? Technically you can, but think about how confusing it will be to use an image style called "Homepage news article images", not on the homepage and not on news article images.

Creating reusable image styles

One very efficient way for creating reusable image styles is to name them based on the image aspect ratio or dimensions, or a combination of both. For example: "16:9 (Max 320px)", or "Box 1:1 (500px)". Here are some reasons why this is a great way to name image styles:

• They are not specific to any page or type of image (articles, events, etc.)
• They provide key information about the image aspect ratio and their dimensions
• I can use these image styles hundreds of times on any image that fits the requirements as well as on any page
• By creating/naming image styles this way, I may have just saved myself from creating many other image styles

Identifying the images patterns

I have found one of the most effective ways for identifyiing the image styles you need to create is by looking at your website mockups (if you are fortunate enough to have them). This may not always be possible, but if you do have designs for your website, this will tell you exactly which images you will need and how they need to be rendered. Having this information upfront will help you tremendously when creating image styles because you can plan ahead of time how to create reusable image styles that share commom attributes.

Image styles use cases

When naming image styles it helps me to think of the characteristics of the images I am creating image styles for. For example, I have an image that should be rendered in 16:9 aspect ratio and it should not exceed a width of 320px. This is how I arrived at the name 16:9 (Max 320px). This also makes it possible to know which image style to use if I have other images that need to be rendered similarly. By the way, it is perfectly okay to use an image style that is slightly off from what an image needs to be rendered at. For example, Let's say I have an image that should be rendered at 16:9 aspect ratio, but its size should not exceed 250px. for this image, I can still use the 16:9 (Max 320px) image style.

A 100px or even 200px difference between the image style dimensions and the image you need to use it on it's an acceptable thing to do for a couple of reasons:

• 100 or 200px in most cases will not make a big of an impact in performance, however, if you are rendering 50 of these images in a single page, then this could certainly present performance issues. So my rule is as long as this is a oneoff type of situation, I'm okay with doing this.
• Keep in mind that just because your image may be resized larger than it actually needs to be rendered, your image will still visually rendered at the right size as I would suppose it is inside a container that will be sized to the right rendering size, via CSS.
• Being able to reuse an image style that may be slightly larger than needed saves me from creating more image styles.

I hope you see the impact good names for image styles have on your site. When you are working on an enterprise level website, using the best practices above can really help you with the maintenance of your image styles.

Image styles effects

Effects are the rules you set on each image style. Rules such as cropping, sizing, converting, saturating, rotating, and scaling of images is how we determine how to render the images in our site. In most cases, you want to let content creators of your site upload images that are relatively big. Doing so will allow you to use the images in your library in any use case. It is perfectly okay to scale your images down thorugh the use of image styles, but it is not recommended to scale images up. Doing so will result in blurry or pixelated images. This is why is better to upload large images. But you may be thinking, if I upload super large images, this will affect the performance of my site. It will if you are rendering the original images, but since we are using image styles, Drupal uses the original image to make copies at the size and aspect ratio you defined in your image styles. This is why by uploading a single image you are able to use it in many use cases at different sizes or aspect ratios.

Image styles effects can vary from image style to image style. For example, some image styles will require images to be scaled down, then cropped. Others will require images to be resized then cropped and others may just need for images to be resized to specific size. All these actions are called "Effects" in image styles. The effects you apply to your image styles will depend on the end goal for rendering the images. Let's do a quick demo of creating one image styles then applying effects to it.

Hands-on excercise

All the principles covered in this series apply to Drupal 8, 9, and 10. You can follow along or simply watch me do it. To get started, spin up a vanilla Drupal site of the version of your choice. At the begining of this series I mentioned we will stick with only core/out of the box functionality to keep things simple.

Creating a new image style

1. Login to Drupal as administrator
2. In your Drupal site navigate to /admin/config/media/image-styles
3. Click Add image style
4. For Image style name type: 16:9 (Max 320px)
5. To keep things nifty, edit the image style machine name so it reads 16_9_max_320px. (Remove the trailing underscore generated by the ending parenthesis in the image style name. Clean machine names are important to me 😃. It actually makes a difference when you are debugging issues and you find your machine name has an extra underscore you didn't catch).
6. Click Create new style

The image style above follows the best practices for name we covered earlier. This makes this image style reusable on any image that meets the aspect ratio and dimension requirements.

Adding effects to the image style

For the purpose of this exercise, we are going to use the Scale and crop effect. This is probably the effect I use the most because it does exactly what I want, scale the image down to the size I want and crop it in the aspect ratio I need.

1. While in the page where the new image style was created (/admin/config/media/image-styles/manage/16_9_max_320px), scroll down and you should see the Effect dropdown
2. Select Scale and crop from the dropdown
3. Click Add. The Add Scale and Crop effect screen will come up
4. Type 320 for width and 180 for height. Note: These two values are required when you select the scale and crop effect. In other effects, these values may not always be required. It is important to define fixed dimensions on your image styles. This ensures your images will be sized/cropped at exactly the size you expect them to. How did I figure out the height for a 16:9 image with a width of 320px is 180px? I used this online aspect ratio calculator.
5. Notice how you can change the focal point of the cropping by clicking any of the circles under Anchor. For this example we'll keep it in the middle circle.
6. Click Update effect. This will bring you back to the image style page.
7. We're done!

Now we have one custom image style with specific effects. If you noticed, Drupal comes with a couple of predefined image styles. If they work for your images you should make use of them. In this series we will be creating custom image styles.

As I mentioned earlier, names of image styles should be descriptive but not limiting. In the case of some of the image styles that come out of the box with Drupal, the names Large, Medium, and Wide do not seem like good choices for names because those names are all relative. Large in relation to what? Medium in relation to what? ...just sayin'.

Image multipliers

One thing we have not discussed but it is very important in responsive images, is the use of "Image Multipliers". What are image multipliers? In responsive images, you often think of image sizes in natural dimensions. If I think of an image that needs to be rendered at 720px, I will most likely resize or crop that image at 720px which makes total sense. With the evolution of high density or high resolution (retina) screens on mobile and larger devices, because they contain thousands or millions more pixels than traditional resolution screens, images need to actually be bigger than the intended size so they are rendered at their highest resolution/quality. This is what image multipliers are.

If we go back to the example above of the 720px image. For this image to be rendered as sharp and high-quality as possible in retina screen devices, we should add a 2x or 3x multiplier to it. Meaning, we should create an image styles for this image at twice and three times the intended size (1440px, 2160px). When we do this, the image will still be rendered at 720px (visually), but because we are providing larger images, these images will have twice or three times the number of pixels within them and when viewed in high resolution screens, the image quality will be superior than if we are only providing a regular 720px image. Note: I typically only create a 2x multiplier image styles for most of my images, but there may be situation when there are specific requirements for creating a 3x multiplier image styles.

Create a 2x multiplier image style

The same way you created the original image style above for 16:9 (Max 320px), go ahead and repeat the process but this time create a 2x multiplier image style, 16:9 (Max 640px). Remember, the dimensions of this image style should be 640 x 360px.

So what's next?

With our custom image styles in place, we can now make use of them, but before we do, let's go over another very important concept within Drupal, Responsive image styles ...whaaaaatttt?
We'll comeback to Drupal in a bit but first, we'll talk about responsive image styles in the next post.

Navigate posts within this series

• < Image resolution switching using srcset and sizes attributes
• Responsive image styles >

In the previous article we defined what art direction is and how to address it using the <picture> element. In this post, the focus will be how to address responsive images when the requirement is image resolution switching. Resolution switching, in the context of responsive images, is rendering identical image content on all devices. Unlike art direction where each device gets a differently cropped image that may vary on aspect ratio, resolution switching uses images that are simply larger or smaller based on the device but retain the same aspect ratio and cropping settings. Resolution switching is how most images are rendered (the rule), the <picture> element approach is the exception to the rule. Take a look at an example of resolution switching below.

The image above demonstrate how multiple resolutions of the same image can be served to different devices. All the images in the example above are cropped exactly the same maintaining the same aspect ratio from large to small.

Using srcset and sizes attributes

Using the srcset and sizes image attributes is how most images are rendered in the web today. As indicated before, this is the recommended way for configuring responsive images if all you need is to switch resolution of images rather than art direction. So how does this approach work? Let's take a look at a typical configuration of the <img> tag using the image above as an example of the different image sizes we will want the browser to choose from:

Let's break things down so we can understand this approach better.

• <img>: Right off the bat we start by using a widely supported html tag.
• srcset: The srcset attribute in the img tag serves two important roles, 1) It stores a list of images that can be used by the browser, 2) Each image provides its width value which plays a role on the browser choosing the right image.
• sizes: The sizes attribute tells the browser the width, in relation to the viewport, the image should be rendered at. The value of 100vw shown above, means the image will be rendered at 100% the viewport width on all the devices. You could also use media queries like (max-width: 720px) 100vw, 50vw. This means that if the device does not exceed 720px in width, the image will be rendered at 100% the viewport width, otherwise (if the device is larger than 720px), the image will be rendered at 50% the viewport width.
• src: The src attribute is used as a fallback if everything fails.

What does it all mean?

Let me explain things in more detail because it is important we understand how this approach is so much better than using the <picture> element.

The biggest difference/advantage of using srcset and sizes versus <picture>, is the fact that we let the browser decide which image is the best image to render on any device. This is possible thanks to all the information we have supplied to the browser. For example, in the srcset we are not only providing the browser with a list of images to choose from, but we are also telling the browser how big each image is. This is very important because the browser will use this information when choosing the image to render. In the <picture> element approach, the image size descriptors are not available.

The sizes value tells the browser the size the image needs to be rendered at in relation to the viewport. This too is extremely important information we are providing the browser because if the browser knows the dimensions of all the images to choose from and how big/small the image needs to be rendered, then the browser is able to pick the best image possible.

But that's not all, the browser is smarter and knows more about the web environment than we do when a page or image is rendered. For example, the browser knows the viewport width used when viewing a website, it knows how fast/slow your internet connection is, and it knows about any browser preference settings (if any), setup by the user. Using all this information the browser is able to determine which image from the srcset is the best to use. In contrast, with the <picture> element, we tell the browser which image to use solely based on the device size.

Closing the gap

Now let's see how using the srcset and sizes attributes closes the gap we identified when using the <picture> tag.

Pretty nice huh? Now thanks to the srcset and sizes attributes we've closed the gap and the browser has all the information it needs to ensure the best image is served to each device.

The next post of this series will focus on image styles. These are fun but can also get you in a lot of trouble if not properly done. See you there.

In closing

Time for a story: I recently did an experiment that 100% proves the use of resolution switching using srcset and sizes attributes. As most people nowadays, I use a very large second display when working on projects to fit more apps and see things better. My second display is nice but it's not a 4K display. It's double the physical size of my mac's screen, but the mac's screen resolution is higher by almost double (twice the number of pixels). When I look at an image of a project where I've implemented the practices in this guide, in the large display, and inspected the page, I see the browser has selected an image that is 720px which makes complete sense for the use case I am testing. I then unplugged the second display and viewed the page on my mac's screen (higher resolution), I reloaded the page and inspected it, I noticed the browser has now selected an image that is double the size of the first image. This is exactly the behavior I would expect because my mac screen is of higher resolution and my connection speed is very fast. So the browser was able to make the smart decision to use a different images based on my environment.

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• < Art Direction using the picture HTML element
• Image styles in Drupal >

Drupal's Media is a powerful tool and we will use it to improve the way we manage responsive images by using media types and view modes to our advantage when managing responsive images. The following quote comes straight from Drupal's Media module:

In Drupal, the core Media module manages the creation, editing, deletion, settings, and display of media entities. Media items are typically images, documents, slideshows, YouTube videos, tweets, Instagram photos, etc. Media entities are standard Drupal content entities. And are grouped by Media type bundles. Like content types they can have fields added, and their display can be managed via view modes.

Media in Drupal

Out of the box, Drupal ships with the following media types: Audio, Document, Image, Remote video, and Video. You can create new media types if needed. For example, you could create a new media type that is of type "Image". Why would you do this? Well, in some cases, you may have specific requirements to handle images of a particular entity and rather than modify the existing Image media type, you could create a new one so you can manage specific settings on the new type and don't run the risk of breaking something on your site by updating the default Image media type. Creating new media types is outside the scope of this post, but wanted to let you know what's available to you.

1. Let's start by enableing the Media and Media Library modules as these are not enabled by default
2. Navigate to /admin/structure/media
3. Since we'll be working with images, click the Edit link to the right of the Image media type
4. We won't get into all the wonders of Media types, instead let's jump into Manage display

Like any other Drupal entity bundle, Manage displays, also known as View modes, are a pretty powerful feature. So what are view modes? View modes is how we display content in different ways. Take a look at the image below. Each of the numbered marks is a view mode. Same content, different ways and different fields.

Media view modes

Now that we understand how view modes work, we will use them to manage/display our responsive images. Let's start by creating a new Media view mode.

1. Within the Manage display tab for the Image media type, scroll down and expand the Custom display settings fieldset
2. Click Manage view modes
3. In the View modes screen scroll down to the Media section and click Add new Media view mode
4. Type News listing as the view mode name.
5. Click Save
6. Go back to the Image media type Manage display screen (/admin/structure/media/manage/image/display)
7. Scroll down and expand the Custom display settings fieldset
8. Check News listing and click Save. This enables the newly created view mode. You should now see it under the Manage display tab for the Image media type.

Configure the new view mode

It's time to link the new view mode for the Image media type with the responsive image style we created.

1. Withing the Manage display screen, click the News listing view mode we just created
2. Change the Format of the image field to Responsive image. This allows us to pick a responsive image style of our choice.
3. Click the gear icon to the right of the image field
4. Under Responsive image style select Content grid. This is the responsive image style we created in the previous post.
5. Link image to nothing
6. Click Update
7. Scroll to the bottom of the page and click Save

What did we just do?

We just put all the pieces together which will result in well-managed responsive images. The order we followed is:

1. Image styles: These are several image templates that share similar attributes (i.e. aspect ratio).
2. Responsive image style: This is a collection of image styles that fullfill a specific use case.
3. Media type and view mode: We have specific requirements for news and event article images. View modes allow us to fullfill these requirements without affecting other image displays.

Where do we use the responsive images?

So image styles, responsive image styles and image view mode are all connected and working great (you'll have to take my word for it 😃). One thing though, what content in our site will take advantage of all the beutiful work we've done? How about news articles? Take another look at the screenshot below. That's what we will do with all the work we've done.

Configure the Article content type

Since we opted to use news article images as the content to work with, there is a little clean up we need to do first in the Article content type.

The image field that ships with the Article content type does not use Drupal's Media, it's a basic image field. This does not mean we can't use responsive images with this type of image field, we can, but we get more out of the Media type field (view modes for starters). In addition, with the media type image field, we can take advantage of media library, add more fields to the image media type, reuse images, and much more.

Remove the image field from Article content type

Warning: Removing the image field will result in loosing any images you may have uploaded using this field. Only do this if you are sure you don't need the images. I never tested deleting the image field on a site that already had images so I am not sure if Drupal will even let you delete it.

1. From the admin toolbar, click Structure, Content types
2. Click Manage fields to the right of the Article content type
3. For the image field, click the dropdown under Operations and select Delete
4. Click Delete again to confirm you want to delete the image field. The image field is now gone

Adding a new media reference field to the Article content type

1. Still within the Manage fields for the Article content type
2. Click Create a new field
3. In the Add a new field dropdown, select Media which is located under the Reference section. Notice there is also an image field, but this is the same kind we just deleted. Media is what we want.
4. Type Image as the label for the new field
5. Click Save and configure
6. Keep the Allowed number of values as Limited to 1 and click Save field settings
7. Optional but always a good practice is to add Help text. (i.e. Upload or select an image for this article)
8. Check the box if you want to make this a required field
9. Reference method should be Default
10. Check the Create referenced entities if they don't already exist checkbox
11. For Media type check Image (extremely important)
12. Click Save settings. A new Image field is now available but this time it's a Media reference field of type Image.

Arranging the field for content entry and content display

By default the new image field was added at the bottom of the list of fields. Let's move the field up. We will follow the same steps for the Manage form display (for when content is created), and Manage display (for when content is displayed on the page).

1. Within the Manage form display tab scroll down until you find the new Image field
2. Drag it up so it displays right under the Title field
3. Click Save
4. Repeat for Manage display

Configure responsive images for the new image field

1. Still within the Article content type page, click Manage display
2. Drupal by default provides 3 view modes for the Article content type: Default, RSS, Teaser, and Full content (not enabled by default). We can create as many new view modes as we want/need, but for this excersice we will use Teaser.
3. Click Teaser from the list of view modes
4. For the image field, make sure its Format is set to Rendered entity. Since the new Image field we added is of Media type, the image is an entity and we want to render it as such.
5. Click the gear icon to the far right of the Image field
6. Under View mode select News listing. This is the view mode we created for the Media image type field.
7. Click Update then scroll down and click Save. That's it.

Displaying responsive images in news articles

Before we can see the responsive images, let's create a couple of news articles so we have content to work with. Go ahead and create a few news articles using the Article content type. Upload large images if you wish so we can see the work we've done in action.

In the next post, we will complete the configuration and display of responsive images.

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• < Responsive image styles
• Responsive images, wrapping up >

Images are an essential part of a website. They enhance the appeal of the site and make the user experience a more pleasant one. The challenge is finding the balance between enhancing the look of your website through the use of images and not jeopardizing performance. In this guide, we'll dig deep into how to find that balance by going over knowledge, techniques and practices that will provide you with a solid understanding of the best way to serve images to your visitors using the latest technologies and taking advantage of the advances of web browsers in recent years.

Hi, I hope you are ready to dig into responsive images. This is a seven-part guide that will cover everything you need to know about responsive images and how to manage them in a Drupal site. Although the excercises in this guide are Drupal-specific, the core principles of responsive images apply to any platform you use to build your sites.

Where do we start?

Choosing Drupal as your CMS is a great place to start. Drupal has always been ahead of the game when it comes to managing images by providing features such as image compression, image styles, responsive images styles and media library to mention a few. All these features, and more, come out of the box in Drupal. In fact, most of what we will cover in this guide will be solely out of the box Drupal features. We may touch on third party or contrib techniques or tools but only to let you know what's available not as a hard requirement for managing images in Drupal.

It is important to become well-versed with the tools available in Drupal for managing images. Only then you will be able to make the most of those tools. Don't worry though, this guide will provide you with a lot of knowledge about all the pieces that take part in building a solid system for managing and serving responsive images.

Let's start by breaking down the topics this guide will cover:

1. What are responsive images?
2. Art Direction using the <picture> HTML element
3. Image resolution switching using srcset and sizes attributes
4. Image styles and Responsive image styles in Drupal
5. Responsive images and Media
6. Responsive images, wrapping up

What are responsive images?

A responsive image is one whose dimensions adjust to changes in screen resolutions. The concept of responsive images is one that developers and designers have been strugling with ever since Ethan Marcotte published his famous blog post, Responsive Web Design, back in 2010 followed by his book of the same title. The concept itself is pretty straight forward, serve the right image to any device type based on various factors such as screen resolution, internet speed, device orientation, viewport size, and others. The technique for achieving this concept is not as easy. I can honestly say that over 10 years after reponsive images were introduced, we are still trying to figure out the best way to render images that are responsive. Read more about responsive images.

So if the concept of responsive images is so simple, why don't we have one standard for effectively implementing it? Well, images are complicated. They bring with them all sorts of issues that can negatively impact a website if not properly handled. Some of these issues include: Resolution, file size or weight, file type, bandwidth demands, browser support, and more.

Some of these issues have been resolved by fast internet speeds available nowadays, better browser support for file tyes such as webp, as well as excellent image compression technologies. However, there are still some issues that will probably never go away and that's what makes this topic so complicated. One issue in particular is using poorly compressed images that are extremely big in file size. Unfortunately often times this is at the hands of people who lack the knowledge of creating images that are light in weight and properly compressed. So it's up to us, developers, to anticipate the problems and proactively address them.

Ways to improve image files for your website

If you are responsible for creating or working with images in an image editor such as Photoshop, Illustrator, GIMP, and others, you have great tools at your disposal to ensure your images are optimized and sized properly. You can play around with the image quality scale as you export your images and ensure they are not bigger than they need to be. There are many other tools that can help you with compression. One little tool I've been using for years is this little app called ImageOptim, which allows you to drop in your images in it and it compresses them saving you some file size and improving compression.

Depending on your requirements and environment, you could also look at using different file types for your images. One highly recommended image type is webp. With the ability to do lossless and lossy compression, webp provides significant improvements in file sizes while still maintaining your images high quality. The browser support for webp is excellent as it is supported by all major browsers, but do some research prior to start using it as there are some hosting platforms that do not support webp.

To give you an example of how good webp is, the image in the header of this blog post was originally exported from Photoshop as a .JPG, which resulted in a 317KB file size. This is not bad at all, but then I ran the image through the ImageOptim app and the file size was reduced to 120KB. That's a 62% file size reduction. Then I exported the same image from Photoshop but this time in .webp format and the file size became 93KB. That's 71% in file size reduction compared to the original JPG version.

A must have CSS rule in your project

By now it should be clear that the goal for serving images on any website is doing it by using the responsive images approach. The way you implement responsive images on your site may vary depending on your platform, available tools, and skillset. Regardless, the following CSS rule should always be available within your project base CSS styles and should apply to all images on your site:

Easy right? That's it, we're done 😃

The CSS rule above will in fact make your images responsive (images will automatically adapt to the width of their containers/viewport). This rule should be added to your website's base styles so every image in your website becomes responsive by default. However, this should not be the extend of your responsive images solution. Although your images will be responsive with the CSS rule above, this does not address image compression nor optimization and this will result in performance issues if you are dealing with extremly large file sizes. Take a look at this example where the rule above is being used. Resize your browser to any width including super small to simulate a mobile device. Notice how the image automatically adapts to the width of the browser. Here's the problem though, the image in this example measures 5760x3840 pixels and it weights 6.7 MB. This means, even if your browser width is super narrow, and the image is resized to a very small visual size, you are still loading an image that is 6.7 MB in weight. No good 👎

In the next post of this series, we will begin the process of implementing a solution for handling responsive images the right way.

Navigate posts within this series

• Art Direction using the <picture> HTML element