The original resolution to this issue, bug 21987, caused a nasty regression and has since been reverted. Opening this bug so we may pursue a new route to goal. +++ This bug was initially created as a clone of Bug #21987 +++ We use local cover images in our setup, and also resize the covers we scan to a width of 160px before uploading and attaching them to a Koha bibliographic record (we upload one cover per biblio). While using phpMyAdmin to view the contents of the 'biblioimages' table (relevant screenshot here: https://imgur.com/a/cSEVLBI), we noticed that the size of the BLOBs for the 'thumbnail' column was in some cases twice as big as that of the 'imagefile' column. In fact, this happens for more than 50% of uploaded covers as you can see from the output of the SQL queries below: mysql> SELECT COUNT( * ) AS count FROM biblioimages WHERE LENGTH( thumbnail ) > ( LENGTH( imagefile ) * 2 ) ; +-------+ | count | +-------+ | 1356 | +-------+ mysql> SELECT COUNT( * ) AS count, SUM( LENGTH( imagefile ) ) AS images_size, SUM( LENGTH( thumbnail ) ) AS thumbnails_size FROM biblioimages ; +-------+-------------+-----------------+ | count | images_size | thumbnails_size | +-------+-------------+-----------------+ | 2347 | 68323933 | 115839686 | +-------+-------------+-----------------+ It would appear that for each 160px-wide JPG with 24-bit depth that we have uploaded, the 'imagefile' column has been populated with an PNG of 8-bit depth with the same dimensions as the uploaded file, whereas the 'thumbnail' column contains a 24-bit PNG image with a width reduced to 140 pixels. I've tracked down the creation of resized 24-bit PNGs to this code: https://github.com/Koha-Community/Koha/blob/master/C4/Images.pm#L182-L183 Do thumbnails for covers need to be true colour (24-bit) images? Also, why is it that _scale_image() returns an image of 8-bit depth if the source image's dimensions are less than 600x800? (i.e. when no resizing is performed)
Please also check Bug 31049 - Add tool to set/reduce local cover image size and quality, interactively and in batch.
*** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of bug 31049 ***