[Friendly reminder] Limit JPEGs to maybe full HD resolution

Meta
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Hm, everybody is free in how and for what reason images are posted in whatever resolution. However, I personally think that limiting the resolution as a policy is against the spirit of this forum (and probably the spirit of the cc licenses, not their possibilities). If somebody licenses only small images with cc and makes money from the full size pictures is fine, it’s the choice of the original producer of the work. In my opinion, however, one fundamental aspect of the whole FLOSS software movement and the “ecosystem” that grew around (such as cc licenses) is that it allows learning from things others published (e.g. learning from the code of others, or, e.g., the photo editing of others). The PlayRaw threads, e.g., are a perfect example for that.

As said, the images should be downloaded in full size on demand only, not always. This is something that for sure can be solved technically. For the upload traffic, I am sure this does not play a role, and if your connection is slow it is no problem, you can always upload a small file. I only argue against making small image upload the default by policy.

I don’t think uploading small images is of tremendous help here. The moment an image is on the internet you are losing control over how it appears at the user, since you cannot control any of the viewing circumstances (display size, display color management, display brightness, surrounding light, time of day, mood of the person in front of the screen, …).

As a professional photographer (meaning I have to make my income from photography), I would hardly put those pictures I want to sell in low resolution on pixls.us to hope somebody wants to buy a full size version. I think there are better ways to increase the success of my photography job, e.g. by showing my skills on pixls.us (e.g. by posting images that are looking good even in 100% view) and hoping I will get jobs from that. But overall, I do not think pixls.us is a good place for advertisement at all, there are for sure better places for that. For me, pixls.us is rather a place to learn.

Don’t worry, the amount of work for chris does not count anyway.

Unfortunately, 1 of the 2 images that had less than acceptable resolution have been edited with Gimp in a second step. Therefore, I had to cheat a bit and reproduced these edits (fortunately it was not too much, only some cloning out of flares, which I was able to reproduce with darktable 2.5 then :wink:).

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FYI we have set a limit on file size, I think it is a few hundred MB. I don’t think we’ll set a resolution limit ever, nor do I think that was the point of this thread. @darix, the originator, is our system administrator for discourse and I’d assume is looking at file size as a function of system administration.

I think that the point was to think about the file sizes you are posting. Use a little jpeg compression in general. We do pay for storage :wink:

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I know. I did not mean a technical limit, I thought of it more like a policy, which is e.g. encouraged by making a post sticky that tells people to not upload high res.

Yes, my annual christmas donation is still pending, I know. Had much trouble over the last month (very bad things happened). But I promise I’ll not forget.

However, I am sure that this is not an issue if the forum software behaves prudent. If this is not the case and we are uploading only small files as a workaround for a software flaw that may be corrected some time in the future, we might worry later when the issue is fixed, that we do not have all these wonderful images in high res.

Of course, everybody should as well be prudent about uploading images. Pulling the jpeg quality slider entirely to the right is hardly beneficial (I cannot imagine a case, when I really need mathematically accurate data I would chose png or tiff over jpeg).

Anyway, to sum up, IMO there are enough images in way too low resolution on the internet, please don’t make it a norm here. Wasting bandwidth is no option, and the nice thing here is that we do not waste it by having silly animated gifs in our signatures. But there is data that is useful and deserves spending the bandwidth. And if the issue is really not caused by missing prudence in the discourse software, I ask for explaining the issue since I then did not get the point.

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I totally didn’t mean it that way! I actually have no visibility into who donates what, other than the “Supporter” designation. Your participation is what is valuable. Your monetary contributions are deeply appreciated, no matter if they’re one time or on-going!

I don’t think it is a software problem, though we’ve encountered a few quirks, we work to report them upstream and get them fixed!

Is 1920x1080 too low?

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I thought this thread was in response to people uploading large images indiscriminately; e.g., a new member uploading 10 screenshots of barely anything in one post.

PS Loading speed could also be an issue. At least for me, I don’t enjoy waiting for a thread with lots of large images to load, along with MathJax. Sorry my devices are ancient. :stuck_out_tongue:

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Don’t worry, it was more a reminder to myself.

Hm, I think the original images are loaded when the lightbox opens, but I do not think this makes sense. The lightbox could easily load a smaller resolution that suits the actual screen size. Only when the picture is clicked again or the download button is pressed, it should load the full size image.

One could even implement an even smarter solution: The lightbox opens the resolution fitting to the screen size. Clicking the image again opens a full resolution version with a reasonable compression if the original image’s size does not fit to the resolution (e.g., “100%” jpeg images would be reencoded as “70%”. Only if the download button is directly pressed (and it then should be renamed to “download original file”), the full size image in its original form should be loaded.

As a policy, even if not technically enforced? Probably. Depends, of course. For photographs, yes. 1920x1080 is, especially for photographers, not the display resolution of choice anymore, And pixel peeping is interesting for denoising questions.

It happens often that I find an interesting image, e.g. on flickr, which has appropriate license (e.g. cc) and which I would love to set as a wallpaper on my computer, but to make it span both displays I would already require 3840 px on the longer side, and too often, I then discover that the maximum size available is 800 by 600.

The author always has the option to give a license of choice and upload as a resolution of choice. Combining low-res upload with cc licenses just does not feel right to me for many little reasons (again, not for an individual case, but as a general policy).

Of course, if the decision about image size is critical for the financial health of this community, I am the first to speak up to limit image sizes. But I am sure, not all technical possibilities have been tried (see above). Of course, this is something to happen upstream, but I think the default implementation of discourse was never meant for an image heavy photography forum, so there may be room for improvement.

However, this is just my weird opinion.

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And, there is a bug in the lightbox implementation that loads the next image in full size whenever I click the center of an image on my mobile phone. It does happen on the phone only.

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When going to 100% within the light box, is it currently the same as download? I don’t know about re-encoding JPGs because it has been a major headache for many on social and messaging platforms.

I have been bearing with this reality for a long time. The issue is that the left and right arrows are in the wrong spots, so it is easy to misfire. To zoom, you would have to scroll hard right, past the right arrow. (It really sucks to have a low res mobile screen.)

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I dunno exactly how many pennies are in the coffers, but we have plenty, thanks to all the generous people.

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@chris not every thread is about noise reduction pixel peeping. especially most of the play raws.

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@darix, that was just one out of several example reasons I gave. I see that we have a totally different opinion regarding this topic. I don’t think that I can convince you, and you will not convince me unless this is financially critical for this place to survive. So I do not think we should continue to discuss this, since it will just repeat the same arguments. Don’t worry, I don’t think it’s a problem. It’s just my weird opinion.

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Sorry @darix, this sounded a bit too harsh, and also took the arguments of others into account. It was not meant to. I still think it should be the user’s choice what size to upload. IMO we should not recommend to upload low size in general, but we could ask for being reasonable when uploading and explain what sizes would fit which purpose. This may be even more about jpeg quality than resolution.

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It is the users choice. we cant stop you from doing so. but you could also ask yourself "is it really needed for this discussion to upload a 24, 36, 48 or even 100Mpix image or not.

Simple common sense question.

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I was using mostly HD*1.5 and reducing that to HD should be quite acceptable.
Though I have few panoramas which are somewhat bigger :joy::rofl::crazy_face:

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Just a small note here in case it wasn’t clear…

I believe that @darix originally brought up this thread because for some reason some images weren’t getting lightboxed/thumbnailed correctly by the forum software - and when he tried to view a topic on his mobile it was trying to download the full resolution image?

If so, this is really a bug I’d think - the forum should have created smaller, optimized versions of the images for inclusion in a topic (and would serve the full resolution image when clicked on/requested). I haven’t had a chance to stop and do a proper test of this myself yet (it’s on the list).

If things are working as usual then it shouldn’t be an issue (I think)? Correct me if I’m off-base of course.

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Was there a change in the forum software? When clicking on an image , I don’t get an enlarged image anymore.

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You might need to hard reload the site?

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Unfortunately, @Thomas_Do is right.
Or, at least, I suffer from the same dilemma as he is :frowning:

Also: Formerly, many more avatars were shown as respondents.
Not so any longer :frowning:

also
also1183×72 10.1 KB

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Looks like our sidekiq instance is down. @darix will have to restart it when he has a free minute.

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Yes, I tried but it doesn’t help

You can get a somewhat larger image by right clicking and showing the image in a new browser tab. But full resolution is gone (tested with chrome & firefox under linux).

I also noticed the limited nubers of avatars that @Claes mentioned.