Transformation Presets

Speaker 0: Welcome back to another episode of Short Hops. I'm your host Brian Gillespie. And today, we are covering transformation presets. What are transformation presets, you ask? So one of the more powerful features inside Directus is the ability to transform your images.

We could do things like cropping. We can adjust the color, change it to gray scale. We can use more compressed formats like webp and avif to make our site load faster. Transformation presets are just shortcuts for those. So you can standardize images and formats, sizes across your entire website or application quickly and easily.

So let's take a look. I'm inside a sample project. I've got, some assets here. And if I just open up this, bunny, this is actually probably a hare. You know, we could do things like this where we have our transformations.

Right? So I can adjust the width of this image. I can adjust the height of this image. But imagine I've got a blog page where I have cards that are all, roughly a same size. That's a good use case for transformation presets.

So what can I do? We're gonna go into the Directus settings, to our project settings. We're gonna scroll down to files and storage. And I'll zoom in even further for you here. So there's a couple of settings when it comes to transformations.

I can allow all transformations, which is basically, hey, I can whatever transformation I wanna do as long as it is valid sharp, which is the underlying library that we use, we can do that. I can also disable all transformations, so you get what you get as far as images. And last but not least, I can limit the transformations to presets below. So if you're concerned about people absolutely killing your server with transformations or kind of standardizing, you probably wanna do this limiting option. But as far as our presets, again, these are just shortcuts that you set up to, you know, standardize the format.

So you could see this one called 800 width, or 800 w, is basically just a preset width of 800. We use the webp format. And instead of having to pass all these parameters when I actually get the image, I could just do something like this where in my URL for that specific image, you know, slash assets, slash the UUID for that file, I add a key param and I do 800w. Right? So that saves me a lot of time.

And again, helps me standardize across my website. Creating these presets is super simple. I just go in. If I wanted to create a new preset, let's call it purple. Right?

We'll do 800 wide. Let's do a webp format. And I've just got a additional transform that I wanna do here. We're gonna tint the image and we're gonna apply our directus purple, hence the name purple. So we'll do fit inside, that's great.

Save this. And now if I go back to this specific image, all I have to do is change that key. And I now get a purple tinted hair in a field image. Looks amazing. So that is it for transformation presets.

Try this out. Leverage it in your projects. It's super helpful. We'll catch you on the next one.