Ghost has responsive images

Ghost has responsive images

I've tried Ghost almost as soon as it came out. I liked the simplicity and writing in Markdown. Things changed, and you could see the inspiration from other publishing platforms. However, one thing was always annoying me: images.

When uploading an image to ghost, it would be sent the same way as it was uploaded. This means that images straight from the camera would be delivered to the reader in all its Megapixel beauty. For "mature CMS" or publishing platforms there would be a way to resize them for delivery, or at least compress them. This almost always required using GDlib or imagemagick and maintaining an additional component. Or your own asset server.

For Ghost there was no such option, and for a long time also no API to plug into for this. This GitHub issue speaks for itself and is a good documentation for the situation.

Things have changed, and with the release of Ghost 2.1 images are being resized. Finally! This was what was missing, and I hope the team will put this forward. I'll insert some images to demonstrate this.

Just a sample image (Umm Suqueim / 1st Al Khail road)

Additionally, a "Gallery" block has been introduced, so let's see how useful this is.

This is a promising start. I don't know if there is a way to sort images, but one of the biggest needs has been addressed and I think Ghost is even more usable right now.

The images look quite compressed when viewed 1:1, but are astonishingly small in size. The gallery images cannot be clicked and zoomed, but that's more a theme thing. This page weighs 2.1MB, which is half of the size that any of these images had before the upload. There are no alt attributes possible.

However, when you insert a markdown block, you can still insert images "the old way". Which means, you could actually use an alt attribute.

Image with alt attribute

The image will be treated the same way (longest side 2000px, hard compressed). I have uploaded the image above with an original size of almost 6MB.

So, happy publishing images!