After a bit of experimenting… here are some preliminary results on one image using the Gluon Image Proxy:

This post on Micro.blog, has an image at a size of ~ 689.5KB. That’s not bad. However, most of the time we don’t need the full size image in the timeline. Here is original image of that post.

The image is 1800px wide and 1350px high. However, on a phone screen, which is only around 375 wide (for what I display with padding etc)… we don’t need to load the full sized image.

So, before the image loads on the phone, I pass the URL to the Gluon API including the width that I need, including a small multiplier (in our case *2 = 750px because of the 2x screen density on most phones). This will be device specific.

The API then passes back a URL for me that I can load with the resized image via the Gluon image CDN. This is the image resized for the above post. Note that URL’s are signed so this is the only image you can guess 😋

The image size is… 98.8KB. That’s a saving of nearly 600KB!

I’ll be rolling this out to TestFlight today, so I can experiment with it and get your feedback.

Note that opening images will load the full size image.