The Delicious Brains site has a new tutorial posted introducing WP Image Processing Queue, a tool that allows for on-the-fly image processing in your WordPress application via background processing.

I think the best solution is to get background processing into WordPress core so that all themes/plugins can share a single queue and ensure we don’t impact server performance. And so started my crusade.

At PressNomics, I had a great chat with Mike Schroder. He presented a very good path to core: find a feature that WordPress core needs and that needs background processing. In other words, piggyback! This is exactly how the image optimization stuff made it into core last year: by piggybacking off of responsive images. For background processing, he proposed coming up with an alternative to on-the-fly image processing (OTFIP). Whoa, turns out OTFIP is a problem we regularly deal with for WP Offload S3 as well. This could be a “two birds – one stone” kind of thing. Stars were aligning.

He talks more about some of the current discussions and efforts around processing the images like this (with OTFIP, On The Fly Image Processing). He covers some of the libraries that are currently out there for this processing and how, ultimately, the image processing queue came out to replace them as a result of some work at WordCamp US Contributor Day. He gives an example of the code needed to resize the images and the resulting markup. The post ends with the work he's planning on getting this queuing into the WordPress core and encourages plugin authors to use the OTFIP functionality rather than an external library.