wildlife photography through the lens of an animator

Wednesday, August 27, 2008

Quality of uploaded photos

I have noticed that about a month ago the quality of blogger thumbnails degraded drastically. It wasn't until today that I realized they were re-compressing and ruining our photos during upload. That must have happened around the time when Blogger albums became Picassa albums. This is a real shame and a very frustrating discovery for a photo blogger.

I did a test, uploading the file directly to Picasa and then linking here. You can see the difference:
above: Uploaded directly to Picassa, this is the file I intended to publish. This is how I wanted it to look like. (294k)
above: Uploaded to Blogger, this is the soft crap that the new upload algorithm produces (142k)

My question: Is Google running out of disk space? Are they trying in despair to save 100k per image? My usage meter shows that I have used less than 10% of my storage quota, but my photos have been ruined for over a month!
Has anyone else noticed this?

The solution at this point seems obvious and easy, yet fiddly. I will identify when the genius of jpeg 'optimization' got his job with Google. Then will re-upload all those destroyed photos and update the old posts. How exciting! #@&*$!!!
click on a photo to view hi-res image :: click on a label to open all related posts

2 comments:

  1. My photos are fairly compressed before I upload them and they seem to stay the same size. It seems they may be compressing anything over 150KB. Seems a bit silly as they only offer 1GB anyway so it's not as if a person can use more than they are offering.

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  2. Hi Mosura!
    The logic of this whole thing looks quite weird so far. I've made some observations on the randomness with which images were picked and re-compressed. The choice is obviously made by a bot. I'm trying to figure out what the stupid AI looks for. When I know more, I will post all the info that I have...
    Regards
    N

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