Directory image quality wonky

I've never had issues before, but today trying to update my family's picture, the uploaded file image quality looks poor after the upload.

My steps:
1. I am starting with a very high resolution file, 5631x3754
2. I am resizing it down to the requested 500x375 using paint.net
3. I upload the file using lds.org via my windows pc on chrome browser
4. I click on another directory listing and then back to mine and the image quality is poor. It kind of looks pixelated or has banding in it.

I have tried about 5 different variations of settings when saving the file; png vs jpg, 300 ppi vs 200 vs 100, etc. Nothing seems to solve the image quality problem.

Any tips? In a brief search of the forum I didn't see any solutions.

72dpi is the setting you need to use. Set it to 500x375 @72dpi and that should work.

Liz

Thanks but that didn't do anything better. Now that I look at many of the other pictures on the directory, many of them have this same problem. I also looked at in IE instead of Chrome and the same problem appears. The photo quality is poor. If I click the pictures to see the enlarged version, they are distorted. (These other photos are not ones I have uploaded.)

I am part of a new committee and want to suggest we update the photos on the website, but if they are all going to be poor then I don't want to bother.

Any other ideas?

Sorry if this is annoying, but these are the only things I know to check, and if they don't work, I'd suggest using the app / webpage feedback to log a bug, cuz the only thing left is some kind of bug in the image upload / thumbnail making process...

When I go to http://paint.net it redirects me to http://www.warrenpaint.com/ so I'm thinking neither is right (no evidence of image manipulation service on the latter). So what are you using to resize the file? (Do you just mean the Paint app that comes with Windows, or...?)

Also, please confirm that when you look at the resized file on your computer, it looks good (it's only after the upload that it looks bad). Just confirming it's after the upload that's bad, not before, especially since the aspect ratios differ from your original size to the new size, so unless you're both cropping and resizing, that would create distortion.

Ah, and my brother just reminded me about JPG compression settings - if you're able to specify this, use less compression (I usually only use about 15% compression).

Other than distortion caused by the image resizing process, I'd say it has to be whatever the church's website is doing to the file on upload.

Liz

lmcguire wrote:Sorry if this is annoying, but these are the only things I know to check, and if they don't work, I'd suggest using the app / webpage feedback to log a bug, cuz the only thing left is some kind of bug in the image upload / thumbnail making process...

When I go to http://paint.net it redirects me to http://www.warrenpaint.com/ so I'm thinking neither is right (no evidence of image manipulation service on the latter). So what are you using to resize the file? (Do you just mean the Paint app that comes with Windows, or...?)

It's actually located at http://www.getpaint.net . It is a great freeware image editing software tool.

lmcguire wrote:Also, please confirm that when you look at the resized file on your computer, it looks good (it's only after the upload that it looks bad). Just confirming it's after the upload that's bad, not before, especially since the aspect ratios differ from your original size to the new size, so unless you're both cropping and resizing, that would create distortion.

Yes, the file looks normal on my pc with the 500x375 specs. When I upload it, I'm guessing that the website is doing some sort of processing on the file which is abusing the look of the image.

lmcguire wrote:Ah, and my brother just reminded me about JPG compression settings - if you're able to specify this, use less compression (I usually only use about 15% compression).

Other than distortion caused by the image resizing process, I'd say it has to be whatever the church's website is doing to the file on upload.
Liz

I'm uploading using the highest quality settings. I just uploaded at a slightly lower setting and it is still bad. I decided to SAVE AS the file that the website shows me and it is pretty clear that the website is intentionally downgrading the quality in order to get a small file size (32k, 500x375 @ 96 dpi, 24bit color depth).

I'm going to mess with it a bit more, but I doubt there is any way to get the website to stop processing the file.

Sorry, Chris, I'm out of ideas. The 96dpi is the only part that seems weird to me (all the ones I downloaded were 72dpi, which is normal for the web). Maybe they've changed the code for uploading recently and there's a bug. I'd recommend feedback: https://www.lds.org/tools/feedback?lang=eng

FWIW,

Liz

I went and found a picture in the ward directory of another family that looks really good and I downloaded it. It is 500x375, 96dpi, 24 bit color depth. However, the file size is 293k. When I download my file I am uploading, it is also 500x375, 96dpi, 24 bit color depth, but the file size is 31.8k.

I'm guessing that there has been a decision made to lower the quality to reduce file sizes. If that's the case, the decision went way too far to the other extreme. I'll try submitting a bug but I've never really had success with that other than a nice person saying thanks.

FYI, my brother just uploaded a photo as an experiment, and we can confirm the church are compressing it (and stripping tags). He recommends that you strip any tags and save it with no compression at all, so that when the church compresses the image, they're not compressing an already-compressed image, so there's only one case of degradation, not two. (And DPI setting is completely irrelevant.)

I would recommend you crop it as much as you can so that the important parts are "larger" and that will reduce the impact of the compression...

FWIW,

Liz

lmcguire wrote:FYI, my brother just uploaded a photo as an experiment, and we can confirm the church are compressing it (and stripping tags). He recommends that you strip any tags and save it with no compression at all, so that when the church compresses the image, they're not compressing an already-compressed image, so there's only one case of degradation, not two. (And DPI setting is completely irrelevant.)

I would recommend you crop it as much as you can so that the important parts are "larger" and that will reduce the impact of the compression...

I tried uploading a PNG with no compression and it essentially looks the same (wonky). Also, the small thumbnail is 200x150 and the expanded image is a 500x375, which aren't exactly the same ratios.

I think it is up to the developers to make a better choice on the compression settings.

As an aside, the frustration about this is that I'm not willing to ask people in my ward to upload pictures because they will just look bad. I'd rather ignore the issue and hope this gets fixed but knowing the release cycles of the software, it could be years.

Liz's brother here. I'm wondering if the software you are using is doing saving in such a way as to make the algorithm the used on the web site do odd things. Or if the picture has an odd combination of colors that makes that algorithm behave oddly. Because the image I uploaded, while not as good as the original, isn't that bad. I have put both on a web site so you can see for yourself. The original is 118k the other one is only 16k. Also you may notice the Original is a little blurry from camera shake.

http://ldsgeo.org/test/Original.jpg
http://ldsgeo.org/test/AfterUpload.jpg

Chris W

cdw3423 wrote:Liz's brother here. I'm wondering if the software you are using is doing saving in such a way as to make the algorithm the used on the web site do odd things. Or if the picture has an odd combination of colors that makes that algorithm behave oddly. Because the image I uploaded, while not as good as the original, isn't that bad. I have put both on a web site so you can see for yourself. The original is 118k the other one is only 16k. Also you may notice the Original is a little blurry from camera shake.

http://ldsgeo.org/test/Original.jpg
http://ldsgeo.org/test/AfterUpload.jpg

Chris W

I recreated my 500x375 file using only MS Paint and the result was similar (poor). MS Paint output file was 126k and the file the website ended up with after tweaking it was 36k. Your sample actually looks pretty good.

The images when expanded (clicked on in the directory) look better than the smaller 200x150 image but even expanded they look poor. The smaller 200 x 150 image is the default image people see when using the directory (I would guess it is really just a resized image via the img tag and not a second image file that the website created).

I'll see if I can private msg you the files.

When I browse the ward list, I see other images that are bad quality as well.

I saw your images. The jpeg artifacts are much more noticeable in your image than mine. There are a few reasons for that. 1) I have 1 face, you have 4. 2)My image doesn't have many sharp lines, especially sharp lines that have an abrupt color change. Your image has several sharp lines with abrupt color changes, like the black tie on white shirt, the blue dress against the skin.

Obviously there isn't much you can do about all the sharp lines and color changes. The only thing I can suggest is to crop that image as tight as you can before you resize it. I cropped down to about 60% of it's original width. Obviously that isn't the ideal composition, but you can still see everyone's face which is the most important. Cropping it that much will help, It's hard to say how much until you try it.

I will send you my cropped version of your image in a private message so you can see how tight I made it.

Chris W

P.S. It seems the Church is using a compression factor of 50, if they would back that off by 10 or 15, I don't think this would be an issue. You can probably get a good idea of what it will look like by setting your jpeg compression to the half way point like the web site is doing.

Unless the church has changed something very recently (like in the last week or two), uploaded photos look fine for me. I've uploaded a lot of photos over the last few months and some ward members have also uploaded photos and they all look fine.

cdw3423 wrote: P.S. It seems the Church is using a compression factor of 50, if they would back that off by 10 or 15, I don't think this would be an issue. You can probably get a good idea of what it will look like by setting your jpeg compression to the half way point like the web site is doing.

I noticed they were about 50 as well when I was playing with my compression. It's pretty clear the quality level they have chosen doesn't work across all photo styles that members are likely to use and this quality level needs to be looked at again.

Previously when I saw the other ward members' pictures that look bad, I assumed they had used a really poor cell phone camera or something to take them. Now it is clear that the website processing made them bad.

We have one or two people in our ward that work for the church in development. Maybe I can get some inside pressure to fix it.

After reading these posts, I checked the photos in my directory and they were all good, including some very recent uploads.....