View Full Version : GIF images with JPG extensions
There are dozens of cases of GIF images being served by the productserve server with JPG extensions. The two culprits I've found so far are Photobox and Firebox (spooky coincidence!). My site processes product images and I don't have a reliable method of querying the mime type of the image, which perhaps I shouldn't have to since serving files with the wrong file extension isn't really helpful to anyone. Please raise this issue with merchants because my site's missing a lot of images and my best fix is to block the offending merchants.
If you are handling the graphic server side with php this piece of code could be helpful
Read the file into a variable ($data) using fopen or file_get_contents then check the headers of the file.
<?php
if (substr($data,0,2)==chr(255).chr(216)) $filetype="jpg";
else if (substr($data,0,2)=="BM") $filetype="bitmap";
else if (substr($data,0,3)=="GIF") $filetype="gif";
else if (substr($data,0,8)==chr(137)."PNG".chr(13).chr(10).chr(26).chr(10)) $filetype="png";
?>
Cheers Donk. I am processing the images server side and have already put in place similar checks to the ones you suggest. However, I still think the long term solution is to get merchants to upload images that meet a certain spec, instead of us all wasting server time checking for bad data. Having said that, I hear feed quality is the priority for AW at the moment so hopefully things will improve over time.
Hi authcode
I work for Firebox, managing our affiliate programme. Sorry to hear you're having problems with our feed.
I will investigate where the problem is and get our technical team to look at our images and try to fix the problem our end.
To save time, if you are able to PM/e-mail/post an example of a product where the problem is occuring, that would be really helpful (literally just need the product name). My e-mail is naomi.brownATfirebox.com.
Will get back to you asap.
Cheers
Naomi Brown
Firebox.com
Hi Naomi,
Thanks for taking the time to post and look into this issue - really appreciate it.
I've found a product with a gif saved as jpeg: Micro Mosquito Helicopter
The image is here:
http://images.productserve.com/preview/550/6956090.jpg
and if you click on the link you'll see the image is animated, which pretty much rules out it being a JPG and if you right-click to save it the filename acquires a .gif extension which means the mime-type of the image is GIF.
I know you use animated gifs on Firebox quite a bit so I don't know if you're going to want to make static jpegs for every product, but it would be great if you did!
Confuscius
21-05-07, 14:05
Congratulations Naomi!
I believe that you may be the first Merchant representative to appear on the forum - I am pretty sure that we may have some further suggestions in due course which will help improve the feed from an affiliate perspective - your feed is pretty good already compared to many!
Paul
wow, I feel privileged to be a pioneer ;)
I've spoken to Amarath about the problem, and he's investigating if its something that needs to be fixed at the AW end or ours.
We take all our own images so we often have an alternative static one as well as the animated, its just that in our datafeed it always chooses the 'main' image. So if that is the way to fix it, it might take a while but we could probably replace them.
However, a lot of our images are .gif (static as well as animated), so I reckon if its that the AW server is serving all .gif as .jpg it might be simpler to sort the product server out.
Anyway, we will cross whatever bridge necessary when we come to it :) .
Hi All,
I have had a meeting this morning and we are going to make the following developments:
- serve images in the format supplied by merchant (this was started but not completed)
- develop a scheduled update of all product images on a regular basis
This system will take development but I do believe this is a priority for which the specs are being identified as I type!
I hope this is ok, but as usual any questions please dont hesitate.
Amo
That sounds great, thank you for the update. Will images eventually be required to be a single format (jpeg)? Animated gifs are difficult to deal with and personally I find them quite distracting.
Hi Steve,
We werent too sure of that one actually, so Ill take your input to our head of dev as reccomendation and see what he says.
We werent to sure how easy it is using animated gifs but youve cleared that one up :)
cheers
Amo
hey
Just wanted to say thanks to Amo for looking into this and hopefully amending the way images are served will solve the problem generally.
However, just so you know I am also going to look at firebox product feeds to see if we can always use static images. As I said before, we have a selection for each product so in theory its possible. But might take a bit of time- I will need to make sure that the script that produces our product feeds retrieves the right image.
My view is that it would take a long time to get all merchants to look at all images for this, so short-term its better if AW fixes the way products are served. But perhaps they could also work on some kind of best-practice product feed rules? Just a suggestion.
Will let you know how it goes.
Cheers
Naomi
chartfieldconsultants
22-05-07, 18:41
Hi All,
I have had a meeting this morning and we are going to make the following developments:
- serve images in the format supplied by merchant (this was started but not completed)
- develop a scheduled update of all product images on a regular basis
This system will take development but I do believe this is a priority for which the specs are being identified as I type!
I hope this is ok, but as usual any questions please dont hesitate.
Amo
Was there anything discussed about building in some kind of dynamic resizing of images from feeds?