Auto Image Resizing?

[gonZo]

Here's the deal: you can continue to post attachments in your messages as you usually do (observing the 1-1-1 rule, etc.), but you can use the OTF thread once per 24 hours to prevent one of those images from being thumbnailed. If you screw up and it's an accident, we'll fix it and let you know what you did wrong. Nothing to worry about.

[Nimrod]

So I see a new sticky thread in the off topic section, read what it has to say about it being a dump for random images so that an image resizing quirk can be circumvented so that some users can maintain an intended post formatting scheme. So far so good. Then I follow the "history" line back to the more lengthy description here...

From all the talk I come away with two basic questions (and yes I reviewed the reasoning behind this move and yet the questions persist)

1) If the thread in the off topic (OT) section is not really a thread but something akin to a dump or "testing" post area then why make it sticky? Really, so what if it slips a little? People who need it know it is there and the sticky "Auto Image Resizing" post here in the site issues section will always point the way - in fact it could have a link from here to the dump thread in the OT section. There are a few "just testing" threads in the OT anyway and those could also be used as dumps for these special image needs, no?

2) Just how critical are these image proportions that they need to maintain a specific size or format? If the forum software really is messing things up to a degree that we are having to invent this remote thread post image link set up then we should be looking into what manner of post it is that needs to retain the rigid format or just how messed up things are with the software.

I feel my thoughts on this stem from not ever having had a problem with our posts in KC Strip as our comic has always been 745 pixels wide and up until the last forum upgrade (the one that thumbnails) Kithara or I had always employed the post, then edit with internal link technique (as Q_Be described). It just feels like a bit more fuss and things to keep track of.

Also, I see a sticky thread as a very special distinction and to have one just be a dump is a bit off-putting.

[gonZo]

We added the sticky thread because somebody said earlier that creating his own thread in OTF for this purpose was off-putting.

1) This thread right here is not sticky, and never will be. The OTF thread will remain sticky, because we want users who are new to the concept of posting tagged image links to be able to find it.

2) I think I described the degree that the forum SW is messed up earlier in this thread. Yep. Long story short, this is an interim measure until other solutions can be implemented via the engineering staff.

Granted, it's a little bit more to keep track of. Other people may have different image-posting needs than you do with KC Strip, though, and we're trying to accommodate them.

Cheers,
_
gonZo

[Q_BE]

1) If the thread in the off topic (OT) section is not really a thread but something akin to a dump or "testing" post area then why make it sticky? Really, so what if it slips a little? People who need it know it is there and the sticky "Auto Image Resizing" post here in the site issues section will always point the way - in fact it could have a link from here to the dump thread in the OT section. There are a few "just testing" threads in the OT anyway and those could also be used as dumps for these special image needs, no?

Well, as Gonzo has said, he's trying to keep the threads referencing the topic and problem to an absolute minimum to make it easier to moderate. What we're really trying to establish is a workable solution to this "image resizing" problem so people don't post random crap everywhere for the sake of reposting it elsewhere, while also keeping to the essential rationale for the thumbnail resizing in the first place, which is to save on speed and loading time for users with slower internet connections.

2) Just how critical are these image proportions that they need to maintain a specific size or format? If the forum software really is messing things up to a degree that we are having to invent this remote thread post image link set up then we should be looking into what manner of post it is that needs to retain the rigid format or just how messed up things are with the software.

Well, the "manner" of posts that need images in full-size varies from person to person. For example, you may want to use this new thread in order to thumbnail-archive your KC Strips while also reposting them in your thread in their full glory as you used to be able to do before this change happened as a result of the 2009 Forum Fastapazool. In your case, you wouldn't be subject specifically to the 1-1-1 rule because you are posting your own content (provided that you give your copyright notice in both the Image Attachment thread in Off-Topic as well as the KC Strip. Of course, for you that might seem a little redundant since both threads are sticky threads in the Off-Topic discussion, but I trust you understand my point.

I feel my thoughts on this stem from not ever having had a problem with our posts in KC Strip as our comic has always been 745 pixels wide and up until the last forum upgrade (the one that thumbnails) Kithara or I had always employed the post, then edit with internal link technique (as Q_Be described). It just feels like a bit more fuss and things to keep track of.

Funny enough, it is precisely this "post picture attachment, then internally link the attachment" method that this thread is trying to solve, because Gonzo says that method defeats the purpose of the attachment thumbnails in the first place by forcing the forum to load the same picture twice in the same post, both as an attachment and as an internal reference. The fact that I did this very thing in another thread led to this current discussion between me and Gonzo and caused the creation of that sticky thread you now see.

Also, I see a sticky thread as a very special distinction and to have one just be a dump is a bit off-putting.

I agree the sticky topic seems off-putting, but right now it's the best workable solution we've got so far. I feel better by far having a single go-to thread in which I am licensed to place images for the purpose of placing them full-size elsewhere.

Q-"How do you think about that?"-BE

[SamV]

EUREKA!  

I think I've finally figured out my problem with the larger size thumbs in the forum threads.

Now I know I'm probably in the small minority of users who use a dial-up connection for web access, and I expect a certain amount of delay in loading web pages, particularly if it contains a good bit of graphics. But the load times on the threads since increasing the size of the thumbs have been a lot worst that I expected.

Now I do have my browser set to use a local 512 MB cache, which does help in re-displaying the images in a thread page I frequently return to, but loading any new images seems to take forever, even when the thumb is fairly small, and by that I mean much less then the current 400 by 400 resolution.    

I've also encountered this other bug-a-boo where I can end up getting a partial thumb of some image in a post, and no matter who many times I reload the page it stubbornly refuses to load the missing part of the thumb.

Then while looking at this older thread on morphing Halle Barry http://forum.bearchive.com/index.php/topic,455605.0.html I noticed that some posts had these double images in them, consisting of both a larger size version, and a smaller version of the same image. Anyway what I noticed is that the larger image loaded much more quickly than the smaller size one.

Investageting further I found that the larger version was always a JPEG file, and the smaller one was always a PNG file. That was when I realized that when anyone attaches a picture file to a post the thumb generated by the forum is stored as a PNG file.

Now what possible difference does that make, you might ask.

Well it turns out that while browsers can display image files in a PNG format, they don't do this as efficiently (read that as: quickly) as when the image file is in either a JPEG, or a GIF format. And based on some tests I tried I can say that for both Firefox, and IE 8.

So my question is: Why are all the thumbs that are generated in the forum threads stored as PNG format files?

[gonZo]

We don't have an answer for that question, except to say that the plug-in script that scales and creates the thumbnails saves them as PNGs, and doesn't give us a choice about it. PNGs don't use any file compression, so --as you've seen-- the thumbnail image is sometimes a substantially larger file than the full-sized image, even though the full-sized image may be much bigger in height and width than the thumbnail.

The old, small thumbnails were PNGs that contained a maximum of 62,500 pixels. The new ones contain a max of 160,000 pixels, so the potential file size has increased by almost 100,000 pixels per attachment. So yeah, this should be significantly slower, and may drive anybody who's still on dialup crazy.

[SamV]

Sorry G - have to disagree with you on one bit of your post.

A bitmap image stored in a PNG format is compressed by means of an algorithm that provides lossless data storage. This is different than a JPEG stored image, since JPEGs employ lossy data storage, that is to say, some data is thrown away and not recovered when the JPEG file is decoded to view the image.

That's one of the reasons I think it takes a bit longer to view a PNG file since much like a ZIP file it must receive all, or at least a greater share of the data, to decode the image for viewing. And unlike a JPEG, none of the bitmap image data was done away with when it was first saved in to the PNG file, and a PNG decoder must decompress and fully restore the bitmap image data to the way it originally was.

In any case I guess what I was really asking in my previous post was, if there is no compelling reason to use the PNG file format for thumbnail storage, might it be possible to switch to using JPEG formated files for the thread thumbnails?

[gonZo]

I agree with that distinction, but the drift of my comment was that .png isn't nearly as space-efficient as .jpg. Yes, there may be a way to unhook the png-making altogether, but even if we agree to do that, I wouldn't know which thing to ask the admins to remove or adjust.

[DJPFC]

Did Space Ghost use his shrink ray on that one, Itfields?

Mod edit: use right-click/open in new tab to get the full size image. -Pal


Yeah, that doesn't work for us Mac users.


Control-click (or right-click) the image to bring up the contextual menu, then choose Open Image In New Window.

[Trace]

Or for Firefox, drag the image to the new-tab button on the tab bar for full-size new tab goodness.

[MasterDragonfly]

Did Space Ghost use his shrink ray on that one, Itfields?

Mod edit: use right-click/open in new tab to get the full size image. -Pal


Yeah, that doesn't work for us Mac users.

Worked for this Mac user. On Safari, no less.

[arflech]

It's a full-sized pic, scaled down with HTML; just save it to your desktop and open it to view it in full-sized glory.

I think I remember one of the members here having an avatar like that too; it looked small but unscaled it was the size of the screen and that's why it took so long to load...

[gonZo]

Or for Firefox, drag the image to the new-tab button on the tab bar for full-size new tab goodness.

This also works in Safari for Macintosh! Cool!

[Shara]

This also works in Safari for Macintosh! Cool!

also on chrome while we're adding

[Glottis]

While on the derail, may I ask why the pictures are resized? As arflech pointed out, we are still downloading the full-size image, it's just presented in an inconveniently small size. I understand automatic resizing to a point, but the pictures are just ridiculously small on this forum.

[gonZo]

Attachments larger than 400x400 pixels are scaled proportionately to fit into a 400x400 space for display.
Attachments smaller than 400x400 and all linked images are scaled proportionately to fit into a 120x120 space for display.

The thumbnailing was installed to make image-heavy forum pages load faster. Three different scripts are accomplishing it, we don't know which script is doing which thing, and we doubt the admins could fix it.

[arflech]

Attachments larger than 400x400 pixels are scaled proportionately to fit into a 400x400 space for display.
Attachments smaller than 400x400 and all linked images are scaled proportionately to fit into a 120x120 space for display.

The thumbnailing was installed to make image-heavy forum pages load faster. Three different scripts are accomplishing it, we don't know which script is doing which thing, and we doubt the admins could fix it.

That's a completely different issue: In that case, if you tried to save the image instead of saving the link-target, you actually get a smaller image; server-side thumbnail generation does make forum pages load faster, but client-side HTML scaling does not.

[gonZo]

arflech, please scroll back to message #176 and examine the displayed picture file. As I wrote, there are three scripts doing the resizing, and they're not all doing it the same way.

[ltfields]

Any chance we can get linked images scaled to 400x400 as well?  Or does that require the same amount of Script-Fu?  


Good suggestion, but any changes have to be made by the admins, which narrows the chances of getting it done. Compounding that, it's probably safe to say that nobody knows or remembers which scripts do which parts of the thumbnailing.

[Glottis]

so... I'm not trying to be a dick, but using that HTML attribute doesn't make the page load any faster. It just tells the page to display it resized to a smaller resolution... it still has to download the whole image. If you look at the properties of each image loaded that way, they have the same file size as the full version. Perhaps I'm completely misunderstanding something here, but I think you need to have some kind of server-side script to save and resize the images in order to actually save bandwidth, which doesn't make any sense if the images are being stored on another website anyway.


To repeat myself, differently-sized/attached images are handled by different scripts, some of which are more efficient than others. Thumbs for attached images over 400x400 pixels are created and stored server-side, but they're converted to png format for display, so they're often larger (bytewise) that the unscaled original files. We know we need something better, but getting it will be difficult for a number of reasons.

So yeah, this forum software isn't very good at displaying images, and after we discovered that, the admins installed a couple of modifications to fix it, but those actually just made the thumbnailing even weirder.

[Q_BE]

Perhaps these off-topic posts should be moved to the "Image Auto-Resizing" thread, dear Gonzo?

Anyway, I thought the "Image Attachments" sticky thread was designed to take care of this problem, at least for one thread per day. The point of that thread is for you to attach something that would otherwise be auto-resized, so as to take the forum code for the attached image (which would normally display in a pop-up window) and copy/paste it into the specific post you want it to be displayed full-size.

A funny aside to that is that if you are not logged in, the attached pictures that are rendered as images using the previously-described methods will not appear, seeing as how the forum does not display any pictures in any format (except images hosted on other sites) to non-users. For certain browsers, that will mean seeing a big, fat, "X" image, while for others, it simply won't show.

Q-"All about making the BEA image experience better"-BE

[ltfields]

I'm okay with doing the attachment method, I'll make a point to use that going forward.  It's just some extra steps.  If any scripting gods volunteer their time to fix the code, we'll all be eternally grateful (almost as much as we are grateful for boobies...)