One of the projects I have been working on allows users to upload and share images. Super novel, I know. We are using Supabase for the backend, and the images are stored in Supabase Storage - an S3 compatible object store. I’ve used Supabase a few times now and found it overall to be a neat product (#notsponsored). However, this was my first time using the storage offering and we ran into an issue from the outset. Users were uploading photos from their phones with very large resolutions and consequently huge file sizes. This wasn’t good because we have limits on storage and bandwidth, plus the gallery view of the app was taking forever to load.

Unfortunately, Supabase does not currently support any kind of image optimization. It’s been commonly requested, and quite likely on their roadmap, but at least for now there wasn’t a setting I could quickly toggle to solve the problem. I’ve run into a similar issue before using Amazon S3, and in that project we used a lambda function to do image optimisation when an image was uploaded to the bucket. But this didn’t seem particularly straightforward with Supabase, so I went searching for a different solution.

After researching a couple of different options, what I landed on was a package called compressorjs written by Chen Fengyuan. This library performs compression and resizing of images in the browser. I was a bit skeptical at first, but it's a cool project and has good browser support. How Compressorjs works is that it uses the HTML5 canvas element to read the original image data and perform lossy transformations to compress and resize the image. There's a whole bunch of transformation options. For my project, what I have found is simply changing the maximum width of the image to 600px and slightly reducing the quality has greatly reduced the file sizes.

Here is how you might go about using compressorjs with Supabase:

import Compressor from "compressorjs";

document.getElementById("file").addEventListener("change", (e) => {
  const image = e.target.files[0];

  if (!image) {
    return;
  }

  new Compressor(image, {
    quality: 0.9,
    maxWidth: 600,

    success(compressedImage) {
      // compressedImage contains the Blob
      // Upload the compressed image to Supabase storage
      supabase.storage
        .from("images")
        .upload(`public/filename`, compressedImage);
    },
    error(err) {
      console.log(err.message);
    },
  });
});

Cover photo thanks to Tamanna Rumee