What is the optimal size to upload to 365? I refer to the pixel count. I ask so that I have maximum control over the down-sampling and sharpening so that 365 algorithms will have minor effect on my final results, Prior to today, I have not had concerns and I have been pretty oblivious to the whole thing, as I am sure 99% of Internet photo posters are. However, I uploaded a big panorama today that I had sharpened and coaxed as much out of the bad shooting conditions as I could, but a number of finer points, the sharpening especially, were lost on the 365 result.
I presume that 72 dpi resolution is used here, a pretty standard monitor display? At a maximum of 5 inches for regular and 9 for "large" it seems that uploading much more than a maximum dimension of 700 pixels is counter-productive, leaving 365 to down-sample leaving me little control over how the final image detail will show..
Also, what "down-sampling" algorithms does 365 use? Curious people just want to know.
I would appreciate any recommendations on this subject.
It seems to resample it regardless of what resolution you choose. Large images (the ones you get when you press the magnify button) are 1024 pixels on the long edge, but if you upload an image at those dimensions then it no longer gives you a large view when you click the magnify button.
Larger images are also further resampled by your browser if they don't fit at that size in your browser window, although browser-based resampling is pretty good these days. (Although I think there's a bug in the site's CSS that means they don't resize in some browsers, so some people can't see the bottom of portrait-format images when they view them large)
I think if you upload an image at the normal viewing size (550 pixels on the longest edge) you at least avoid it resampling the image, but it still seems to recompress it (at too high a compression level). And you lose the ability for people to view your images large, so all they can see is the postage-stamp sized version.
To be honest, the poor resampling (oversharpening), excessive compression applied to the resized images, and inability to show images truly large are the reasons I'm not an Ace member here. Out of all the places I upload my photographs to, this site does the worst job of displaying them -- they're too small, they're oversharpened, they're over-compressed, and generally look a mess. The community aspect of the site is great, but as a way to show photographs off to their best, it leaves a lot to be desired.
hi @frankhymus as @abirkill has pretty muched summed up the process, images are resized to 1024 on the longest edge and then compressed and sharpened slightly. The reason for the further compression is mainly because ImageMagick does a better job at creating smaller file sizes for the web than many people upload at. The costs for storing and serving up higher res images are crazily high, which is why the compromise is made. I'm open to trying new compression methods if people have suggestions.
I've been considering enlargening to standard size of photo for a while now, maybe @abirkill could give me his thoughts on what needs improving and I'll get that done.
@jase_h@abirkill@Scrivna - I agree with Jase! Alexis you should open a permanent "Ask Alex" section on the discussion page. I've noticed you've often set straight all the misinformation and confusion that banters around the threads on technical issues and I appreciate that!
One thing that would be really awesome, at least for the more techie amongst us, is if you could fix the bug myself and @harveyzone mentioned -- that is, that if you upload an image that is exactly 1024 pixels on the long edge (and hence already the right size for the site's 'large' view), it would use that.
Currently, if you upload an image that size, you will not get a large view when you click the zoom button. As @harveyzone says, you need to upload it at 1025 pixels wide on the longest edge (or higher) to get that. This means it's impossible to avoid the resampling process for our zoomed images.
I'd guess this might be a simple '>' where there should be a '>=', where the site checks if the long edge of an uploaded image is more than 1024 pixels long, rather than 1024 pixels long or more, when deciding whether to provide a large image.
I understand the file would still need to be recompressed, but at least we would be able to avoid the resize.
I also think that the sharpening performed after the resize is a little intense and can perform some unpleasant results. I'm guessing you are using ImageMagick to do a resize operation and sharpen operation in one hit (so no sharpening is applied to images that don't need resizing?) I'm not sure what settings you are using so it's hard to tell for sure, but something like -unsharp 0x0.75+0.75+0.008 should be relatively subtle. These settings are always tricky though, as a lot of it is personal preference (and no setting will work perfectly for every image)
I understand the need to recompress images that people upload -- I'm not sure what settings you are using, but doing some quick tests the file size for the same image at the same resolution is very similar between here and Flickr, so I don't think the compression is too high per-se, more that the level of sharpening is causing the compression to have to work too hard.
Size-wise, for large images it would be awesome if they could be 1600px wide if a landscape image, or 1200px high if a portrait image. This, when combined with your lightbox module that lets the browser resample the image, would let images fill the screen on modern monitors. However, I appreciate this would require a *significant* increase in disk space for an image of this size to be stored for every upload. Maybe this could be an option for Ace members, and non-paying members get the current '1024px longest edge' large view?
One final thing that would be absolutely amazing would be if the uploader could convert the image profile to sRGB. There have been a lot of discussions here in the past with people complaining that the colours of their images are wrong, that they are too dull, and so on. In some cases I've even seen people say that the site can't display any photo correctly. That's, of course, absolutely wrong, but with software like Lightroom defaulting to ProPhoto RGB and most people not having a clue about colourspace, it's easy to see where they are coming from. When uploaded, the ProPhoto RGB profile is stripped (along with the rest of the EXIF data) so the image is displayed in sRGB, but it doesn't have sRGB colours, and hence looks totally different than it did when they saved it. I'm sure that there are many many more people just accepting this as something they don't understand.
I *think* you can do this using the ImageMagick convert command:
convert image.jpg -profile sRGB.icc rgb_image.jpg
(Making sure you have the sRGB colourspace file on the machine, widely available).
There is some dissent as to whether this works correctly, so it would need testing. If you're interested and can let me know the version of ImageMagick you're using, I'm happy to run some quick tests here with the common 'wrong' colour profiles (Adobe RGB, ProPhoto RGB).
Sorry to go on a bit, but I didn't want to be the dissenting voice that then doesn't come up with any suggestions for improvement. You may of course disagree with anything or everything I've said :). If you want to discuss this further off-line, you have my e-mail address from an unrelated query I sent last week.
Thanks again for the great site! (And thanks to everyone for their kind words -- often I feel like I'm waffling on about things nobody else cares about, so it's nice to be reassured that at least some of the stuff I write is considered useful!)
@abirkill hey, thanks for this, so i've altered the sharpening process.
As of a few weeks ago it should already be converting to sRGB when required.
The largest file size will stat as is for the meantime, but I may change the site to default to the larger size, although browser resampling and support for older browsers may be of concern.
I will look at the 1024 issue now. (done)
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I think you mean:
@Scrivna
Larger images are also further resampled by your browser if they don't fit at that size in your browser window, although browser-based resampling is pretty good these days. (Although I think there's a bug in the site's CSS that means they don't resize in some browsers, so some people can't see the bottom of portrait-format images when they view them large)
I think if you upload an image at the normal viewing size (550 pixels on the longest edge) you at least avoid it resampling the image, but it still seems to recompress it (at too high a compression level). And you lose the ability for people to view your images large, so all they can see is the postage-stamp sized version.
To be honest, the poor resampling (oversharpening), excessive compression applied to the resized images, and inability to show images truly large are the reasons I'm not an Ace member here. Out of all the places I upload my photographs to, this site does the worst job of displaying them -- they're too small, they're oversharpened, they're over-compressed, and generally look a mess. The community aspect of the site is great, but as a way to show photographs off to their best, it leaves a lot to be desired.
I should point out I'm rather picky, though ;)
I've been considering enlargening to standard size of photo for a while now, maybe @abirkill could give me his thoughts on what needs improving and I'll get that done.
Thanks!
@abirkill
One thing that would be really awesome, at least for the more techie amongst us, is if you could fix the bug myself and @harveyzone mentioned -- that is, that if you upload an image that is exactly 1024 pixels on the long edge (and hence already the right size for the site's 'large' view), it would use that.
Currently, if you upload an image that size, you will not get a large view when you click the zoom button. As @harveyzone says, you need to upload it at 1025 pixels wide on the longest edge (or higher) to get that. This means it's impossible to avoid the resampling process for our zoomed images.
I'd guess this might be a simple '>' where there should be a '>=', where the site checks if the long edge of an uploaded image is more than 1024 pixels long, rather than 1024 pixels long or more, when deciding whether to provide a large image.
I understand the file would still need to be recompressed, but at least we would be able to avoid the resize.
I also think that the sharpening performed after the resize is a little intense and can perform some unpleasant results. I'm guessing you are using ImageMagick to do a resize operation and sharpen operation in one hit (so no sharpening is applied to images that don't need resizing?) I'm not sure what settings you are using so it's hard to tell for sure, but something like -unsharp 0x0.75+0.75+0.008 should be relatively subtle. These settings are always tricky though, as a lot of it is personal preference (and no setting will work perfectly for every image)
I understand the need to recompress images that people upload -- I'm not sure what settings you are using, but doing some quick tests the file size for the same image at the same resolution is very similar between here and Flickr, so I don't think the compression is too high per-se, more that the level of sharpening is causing the compression to have to work too hard.
Size-wise, for large images it would be awesome if they could be 1600px wide if a landscape image, or 1200px high if a portrait image. This, when combined with your lightbox module that lets the browser resample the image, would let images fill the screen on modern monitors. However, I appreciate this would require a *significant* increase in disk space for an image of this size to be stored for every upload. Maybe this could be an option for Ace members, and non-paying members get the current '1024px longest edge' large view?
One final thing that would be absolutely amazing would be if the uploader could convert the image profile to sRGB. There have been a lot of discussions here in the past with people complaining that the colours of their images are wrong, that they are too dull, and so on. In some cases I've even seen people say that the site can't display any photo correctly. That's, of course, absolutely wrong, but with software like Lightroom defaulting to ProPhoto RGB and most people not having a clue about colourspace, it's easy to see where they are coming from. When uploaded, the ProPhoto RGB profile is stripped (along with the rest of the EXIF data) so the image is displayed in sRGB, but it doesn't have sRGB colours, and hence looks totally different than it did when they saved it. I'm sure that there are many many more people just accepting this as something they don't understand.
I *think* you can do this using the ImageMagick convert command:
convert image.jpg -profile sRGB.icc rgb_image.jpg
(Making sure you have the sRGB colourspace file on the machine, widely available).
There is some dissent as to whether this works correctly, so it would need testing. If you're interested and can let me know the version of ImageMagick you're using, I'm happy to run some quick tests here with the common 'wrong' colour profiles (Adobe RGB, ProPhoto RGB).
Sorry to go on a bit, but I didn't want to be the dissenting voice that then doesn't come up with any suggestions for improvement. You may of course disagree with anything or everything I've said :). If you want to discuss this further off-line, you have my e-mail address from an unrelated query I sent last week.
Thanks again for the great site! (And thanks to everyone for their kind words -- often I feel like I'm waffling on about things nobody else cares about, so it's nice to be reassured that at least some of the stuff I write is considered useful!)
@mizhayz ... a tip jar... hmmm... perhaps Ross could give him Ace if he wanted it lol.... @Scrivna
As of a few weeks ago it should already be converting to sRGB when required.
The largest file size will stat as is for the meantime, but I may change the site to default to the larger size, although browser resampling and support for older browsers may be of concern.
I will look at the 1024 issue now. (done)
Cheers
@ozziehoffy