How can I prevent trello client from sizing up the pictures when creating a card from photo?

Question

In my board I use the trello client feature: Create card from image -> Take photo

This automatically sets each photo as card cover which is nice feature for creating image-centric tasks where there is even no need to enter the card details.

The client has some limited cache which means offline preview of card covers is limited. So to maximize the amount of images that can be  cached/previewed offline one needs to just reduce their size.

The above however seems impossible, when using the Create card from image -> Take photo feature. I set my camera app analysis/compression settings so that it creates images of no more than 130K, but when trello client (I suppose it is the client's fault) creates the card from the photo, the image actually takes about of space 1Mb.

A workaround was to use the camera externally and then upload through Create card from image -> File. But the whole process is much slower and more complex.

A feature that I would expect to find in the app is to not size up small sized images. Is it possible that extra processing/up-sizing is skipped when the photo has already the expected dimensions?

Any ideas on this?

bess lino · Answer

Hello @Cody Thank you for the reply. Your feedback is well received.

One correction regarding my first message. I just spotted that even with feature Create card from image -> File the images are upsized.

The only way I have found to prevent upsizing is to add them through the Desktop web interface via drag-drop.

Regarding the feature, I believe that, preventing upsizing, could reduce network traffic by up to 10 times (e.g. for all cases where a small-sized card cover is used and there are more than 20 cards on the board). In my case it's not that I need to be completely offline. It is that whenever the app is closed and opened again it needs to download again 3Mb per card cover from the server instead of 300K (which was the original size of photo or file). Actually with the number of card covers that I have (~70) it would not have to download anything because it would never reach the cache limit. But now I need to wait each time the app starts for most of the images to be downloaded again (because they cannot fit to the cache).

Cody · Answer

Hi Bess - thank you for your post, it's clear you've done all the right things when troubleshooting this. I know it's not the best news - we do have some offline features in the mobile app to help when connectivity is spotty, but Trello isn't designed to be used offline for longer periods of time. I can certainly mention this to the product team, but to be candid I don't believe it's something that would be prioritized in the near term.

For now, if you'll be using Trello offline for extended periods, your workaround of uploading the images to your cards as files rather than images is definitely the best option.

Something else to test would be to disable card covers entirely through the board settings under Menu > More > Settings > Enable card covers. The downside is you wouldn't get quick previews of the images on the card's cover. The upside is it might save space in the cache so you can upload more images to review when you have an internet connection again.

Thanks again for posting, and let us know if you have any further questions!