Images Duplicated on Local Server - Is THis Normal?

[andrew_corbett]

Well this has surprised me - I uploaded the link for some product images which are on the same server as Magento.

The link for one image was /001/21525-A-1000.jpg with the local server path as /images

It worked and the image is with the product. What surprised me is that the location of the image in Magento is:

example.com/pub/media/catalog/product/cache/image/e9c3970ab036de70892d86c6d221abfe/2/1/21525-a-1000.jpg

Meaning that the image is now on my server twice. I thought Magento would just link to the image on the local server and that would be it.

So, is this standard (I'm asking because I will eventually have over 100k images and to have them duplicated will take some space)

[PankajS_Magento · Accepted solution]

Hi @andrew_corbett 

In front-end, Magento does not display the exact images you upload for various reasons. The most important reason is that the image may require resizing when displayed on website.

There is no point to display a large image in the product list for example. The resizing mechanism also takes into account some other factors beside size (transparency, quality, watermark, ...). The values for these parameters are concatenated into a string and then md5 applied on that string gives you the e9c3970ab036de70892d86c6d221abfe you see in your image path.

So the image is processed on run-time if it does not exist and in front-end you see the processed image.

So this is normal standard to resize and displaying images. In some cases you might see even more than 2 of the same image.

I hope it will help you.

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If my answer is useful, please Accept as Solution & give Kudos

[andrew_corbett]

@PankajS_Magento 

Thank you very much for your informative and helpful reply