🖼️ Images and Video

Static content refers to files that aren't processed or built using Vite. This includes binary files like PNG, JPG, MP4 or unprocessed text like JSON, and so on. Including images, videos, and other content in your experiment is straightforward. The main issues are where to place the files, how to refer to them in your components, how to preload them so that the participant doesn't wait for them to appear, and what to do for very large files that might not be uploadable in a GitHub repository.

Assets versus Public folder

There are two main places to put static content in a 🫠 Smile project.

Assets folder

The first place is the assets folder (specifically, /src/user/assets/ folders in the project directory). Files in the assets folders are preprocessed in a helpful way. In particular, when your Smile project is "built" for deployment images and other files in the assets folder are copied to the /dist folder with a unique hash code appended to the filename (e.g., logo.png might be renamed logo-139efdf89.png) and the references to those images are automatically updated in your code. This is done to ensure that the browser does not cache the previous version of the image. This can be really helpful to ensure that participants (and yourself) do not see old versions of images that you have updated. You refer to these like this:

<img src="@/user/assets/logo.png" alt="logo" />

for a logo.png file in the /src/user/assets folder.

Public folder

The second place for static content/images is the top-level /public folder. This is where you should put static images that you want to refer to directly in your HTML or CSS. Content placed in this folder is copied directly into the dist folder in the final build without the random hashing. All files in this folder are moved even if they are not directly referenced in the code. This can be useful sometimes as well. For example, if you want to be able to link to a file in some other context (e.g., include the image in a different webpage) then you want to use the public folder.

<img src="/logo.png" alt="logo" />

You could then be able to link to this image on another website like this:

<img src="https://exps.gureckislab.org/e/xx-xx-xx/logo.png" alt="logo" />

where the specific link depends on the final build destination of your experiment (see this). (If you tried linking to content in the assets folder, it might change the filename from one build to the next).

Referring to static assets using code

The examples above use static references to images (i.e., in the template section of the code). This is fine for most cases. However, sometimes your code might dynamically determine which image to display based on some other logic.

There are two specific methods in the Smile API that can help you here. The first is api.getPublicUrl() which will return the URL of a file in the public folder. For example, imagine you have a set of images of bees in the public folder (public/bees/bees-01.svg, public/bees/bees-02.svg, etc...). You could dynamically load one of these images like this:

<script setup>
// load the API
import useAPI from '@/core/composables/useAPI'
const api = useAPI()

// pick a random number
let n = Math.floor(Math.random() * 10)

const bee_public_fn = api.getPublicUrl(`bees/bees-0${n}.svg`) // load that bee
</script>
<template>
  <img :src="bee_public_fn" width="220" />
</template>

The path name to api.getPublicUrl() should be relative to the public folder and should not include the initial /.

Similarly to access a file in the static folder (/src/user/assets) use api.getStaticUrl() again without the initial /:

<script setup>
// load the API
import useAPI from '@/core/composables/useAPI'
const api = useAPI()

// pick a random number
let n = Math.floor(Math.random() * 10)

const bee_static_fn = api.getStaticUrl(`bees/bees-0${n}.svg`) // load that bee
</script>
<template>
  <img :src="bee_static_fn" width="220" />
</template>

There is also a api.getCoreStaticUrl() method that can be used to access files as part of the core Smile builtin library (located at src/assets).

Incorporating video files

For example, to embed a YouTube video you can

use the following code:

<video></video>

Preloading

Preloading refers to asking the browser to load an image or video before it is needed so that the user isn't stuck waiting for it to load. This can be critical in experiments where the stimuli must display quickly.

🫠 Smile provides an easy way to preload images or videos that are stored in by calling

api.preloadAllImages() or api.preloadAllVideos() at an appropriate time (say, after the consent form). For example:

function finish() {
  api.preloadAllImages() // <-- add this to preload images
  api.stepNextView() 
}

Note that 🫠 Smile expects these files to be stored in /src/user/assets

Dealing with large files

Github has limitations on the size of individual files as well as the total size of the GitHub repo (including historical commits). As a result, it is a good idea not to include very large files in your project. This is especially true for video files which can be very large. Instead, you should host these files on a service like Github's Large File Storage system, Dropbox, Google Drive, YouTube or Vimeo and then embed them in your experiment using the appropriate HTML tags.