Forum:Approval for Project TRIM

Introduction to Project TRIM

Project TRIM: Targeted Reduction and Image Management is a huge project I came up with in 2 seconds to manage the sizes of files uploaded to the wiki. The work is to optimize files (Images, GIFs, Audios, Videos) for faster loading and lower file sizes.

Reason of the existence of this project

According to my research (through scraping and automation), 76,543 files in this wiki are over 1MB in size, of which 43,234 are images (excluding JPG format). If we take each of these file as 1MB for the sake of easy calculation, then there are a total of 76,543MB of files in this wiki (of which 43,234MB are images, excluding JPG format). Through my testing of over 400 files (of which 200 were images, 100 were GIFs and 100 were Videos), the total average space saving is of about 30%. If we subtract 30% of the total number of files which are above 1MB in size, then we save 22,963MB (approx.) of storage space (If we take the actual file sizes of all files, we would be saving up to 8TB of space). It would also help with caching and stuff but that's for another proposal you have to wait for.

Why the need of a project?

I would have gone forward to doing it myself but there are few reasons as to why:-

1. My PC is so bad it can't even handle Minecraft Classic on Google Chrome and thus, it will take me 100 Billion years to optimize each and every file.
2. There are more than 100,000 files which is not possible for a single person to do.
3. I know for sure that there are people in here with something higher than GTX 1060 (or Intel UHD 670 in my case), so it would take around 5 minutes to optimize 500 PNG files (approx.) for them.
4. Active participation and collaboration by the community.

Approval procedure

If you approve this project, add 👁 Image
 Support or 👁 Image
 Strong Support if you approve as well as give an assurance that you will collaborate to this project. If you disprove this project, add 👁 Image
 Oppose or 👁 Image
 Strong Oppose if you think it's dumb. If you have mixed opinions, are not sure or are unable to understand even a single word of what this project is about, add 👁 Image
 Neutral.

P.S.: It would be awesome if you add one of the given above and not anything you want, that way it would be easier for people to understand it quickly and easily.

> 👁 Image
MidnightStars ^(talk) 12:55, 7 April 2025 (UTC)

Every version of a file is kept in the history, optimizing already uploaded files will take up more space than if the file was left untouched, since there will be two copies. Mudscape 👁 Image
talk 13:15, 7 April 2025 (UTC)

👁 Image
 Oppose - Optimizing every file on the wiki has been done in the past, but in my opinion it's quite a pointless endeavor. It makes more sense to target files that are frequently used to reduce network traffic. It's not an issue at all if a file that's only used in a gallery of an article has a large filesize; after all MediaWiki already optimizes images displayed in smaller sizes.

And as Mudscape already mentioned, re-uploading optimized versions of files increases server-side storage space instead of decreasing it. | violine1101 ^(talk) 18:18, 7 April 2025 (UTC)

If the file is used in its “native” resolution, as it’s the case for most sprites, is compressing them viable? — BabylonAS 18:21, 7 April 2025 (UTC)

Maybe, not sure. Most sprites are already pretty tiny in file size, though I could imagine that it could improve loading times if a lot of sprites are used (e.g. in navboxes). Either way this is probably something that should be done with a bot, not manually, and definitely not for all files on the wiki. | violine1101 ^(talk) 18:26, 7 April 2025 (UTC)

Cloudflare will already provide an optimized version of the file (usually using webp) to the user. -- 👁 Image
MarkusRost (talk) 19:00, 7 April 2025 (UTC)

Neutral. Idk if it’s a good idea Mineman8182 (talk) 15:12, 14 April 2025 (UTC)