Image improvements, 28/02/06, Blogbuilder news

February 28, 2006

Tue 28 Feb 17:15

Image improvements

Small update to BlogBuilder today:

Uploading zip files with images in should be considerably faster now
We now resize images down to a max of 1280px height and width when they are uploaded
We are now using a higher quality image algorithm so there should be less resizing artifacts from now on. This will slightly improve images already uploaded because it uses a better rendering algorithm, but the biggest improvement will be seen in freshly uploaded images as they will get saved at a better quality and larger size

If anyone has any feedback, please comment here as we'd like to hear if this does indeed improve matters.

: 28 Feb 2006 17:15 | Tags: BlogBuilder Images Update | Comments (6) | Report a problem

6 comments by 2 or more people

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Wow!
Ability to have 1280×1024 downloads = brilliant!
As for improvements in the quality, the proof is in the pudding, and it tastes great:

Before (blacker = worse)

After

based on my Curly Trees picture here

The images definitly LOOK better, but if you take the greyscale distribution (which is Gaussian) and compare the two, the FWHM was about 32% and now it's down to 7%, so that's a quantitative improvement of 4.5 (for this picture only, which is an extreme case). Ideally the gaussian would have zero width meaning it's a perfect bit-wise representation of the original, for reference.

In short: thumbs up all round!

28 Feb 2006, 21:02
I'm sure I've mentioned^W complained about it before, but can't the limit be something high enough that people can upload "wallpaperable" images. 1600×1200 is surely a more sensible maximum to start with, just means people have to host the images externally as well as on WB. I did have a look to see if I could find the reason why you do resizing at all but couldn't find it, I'm sure it was said that hard disk space wasn't the limiting factor…

Nice to see improvements all the same :)

01 Mar 2006, 04:01
For most people 1280×1024 is big enough for wallpapers. Unfortunately the bigger the images get the slower they are to resize. At the moment 1280 is the best balance between getting a nice high res image and getting good performance from the automatic thumbnailing that we do. As you say, size isn't really an issue as our current 80,000 images take up just 7.2GB.

01 Mar 2006, 09:18
Leigh Robinson

Great.

I was hoping something was being done about the images. I mean the old algorithm butchered images… :P

Thanks

01 Mar 2006, 14:49
1280×1024 is "wallpaperable" enough for most people…

as I say in my scientific reports when I haven't really shown anything: "the need for further research is clearly indicated" !!!

01 Mar 2006, 14:54
At the moment 1280 is the best balance between getting a nice high res image and getting good performance from the automatic thumbnailing that we do.

How about storing both the full image (without any resizing) and a more convenient (800px max?) file for thumbnailing and resizing?

03 Mar 2006, 11:59