HTML5 Pre-resize images before uploading

Question

Here's a noodle scratcher.

Bearing in mind we have HTML5 local storage and xhr v2 and what not. I was wondering if anyone could find a working example or even just give me a yes or no for this question:

Is it possible to Pre-size an image using the new local storage (or whatever), so that a user who does not have a clue about resizing an image can drag their 10mb image into my website, it resize it using the new localstorage and THEN upload it at the smaller size.

I know full well you can do it with Flash, Java applets, active X... The question is if you can do with Javascript + Html5.

Looking forward to the response on this one.

Ta for now.

Answer 1

Yes, use the File API, then you can process the images with the canvas element.

This Mozilla Hacks blog post walks you through most of the process. For reference here's the assembled source code from the blog post:

// from an input element
var filesToUpload = input.files;
var file = filesToUpload[0];

var img = document.createElement("img");
var reader = new FileReader();  
reader.onload = function(e) {img.src = e.target.result}
reader.readAsDataURL(file);

var ctx = canvas.getContext("2d");
ctx.drawImage(img, 0, 0);

var MAX_WIDTH = 800;
var MAX_HEIGHT = 600;
var width = img.width;
var height = img.height;

if (width > height) {
  if (width > MAX_WIDTH) {
    height *= MAX_WIDTH / width;
    width = MAX_WIDTH;
  }
} else {
  if (height > MAX_HEIGHT) {
    width *= MAX_HEIGHT / height;
    height = MAX_HEIGHT;
  }
}
canvas.width = width;
canvas.height = height;
var ctx = canvas.getContext("2d");
ctx.drawImage(img, 0, 0, width, height);

var dataurl = canvas.toDataURL("image/png");

//Post dataurl to the server with AJAX