Image dislay question

Harvey I am quite glad to see your posts again, hope all is well and we will see more of your shots.
I am in with Duane, I use Flickr, at times whatever it is that they do makes a vast difference in the IQ of my shots, especially the bright Cardinals, look good on my iMac but horrible at work on a flat screen run of the mill monitor, that does show good IQ generally. With Flickr if they have finished doing their thing and they look bad I will open the shot again, I usually crop to 1500 on the long side, so with Flickr I then post a file that is my original at 1024. You can look at different sizes, you can easily see IQ differences. So when I post here and they have messed up the 1024 version, (one of the sizes they make for you, they will compress or whatever they do with any size but they do save and show your original file so you can go back and forth between Flickr large (1024) or original (1024), you will see your original 1024 file. They have gotten better with whatever it is they do, keep in mind they select the most interesting photos based on a math formula, Hah

BGgraphy wrote in post #14074058
Harvey I am quite glad to see your posts again, hope all is well and we will see more of your shots.
I am in with Duane, I use Flickr, at times whatever it is that they do makes a vast difference in the IQ of my shots, especially the bright Cardinals, look good on my iMac but horrible at work on a flat screen run of the mill monitor, that does show good IQ generally. With Flickr if they have finished doing their thing and they look bad I will open the shot again, I usually crop to 1500 on the long side, so with Flickr I then post a file that is my original at 1024. You can look at different sizes, you can easily see IQ differences. So when I post here and they have messed up the 1024 version, (one of the sizes they make for you, they will compress or whatever they do with any size but they do save and show your original file so you can go back and forth between Flickr large (1024) or original (1024), you will see your original 1024 file. They have gotten better with whatever it is they do, keep in mind they select the most interesting photos based on a math formula, Hah

Thanks for the welcome back, Bret.

I have no idea what causes the change. The other problem is that it does not appear to be consistent. I may just have to do some slight oversharpening for web posting. It's a head scratcher for sure.

Hey Harv. I use Photobucket and had some issues five or six years ago but that was before I changed my Upload Size settings at Photobucket to 1024 at the longest image dimension. In theory if no additional compression is done to the file via scaling or the creating of a second generation JPEG then the file should remain as uploaded. There may be some automated file alteration going on in your host's system, have you contacted their support people?

Nighthound wrote in post #14077360
Hey Harv. I use Photobucket and had some issues five or six years ago but that was before I changed my Upload Size settings at Photobucket to 1024 at the longest image dimension. In theory if no additional compression is done to the file via scaling or the creating of a second generation JPEG then the file should remain as uploaded. There may be some automated file alteration going on in your host's system, have you contacted their support people?

No, I haven't, Steve. What I find odd is that if I look at an image on the SmugMug site, it's fine. I only see a reduction in sharpness when I link to the same image. I always link to the original, which is how I view it directly.

Is it possible that the sites are doing some sort of compression for externally linked files, in order to reduce the load on their site from those views?

Snydremark wrote in post #14078015
Is it possible that the sites are doing some sort of compression for externally linked files, in order to reduce the load on their site from those views?

I was wondering the same thing, but I don't have a clue. I assumed it came posted directly from the host site and had no effect on the forum's bandwidth. I'll leave the question to the techies.

Any time an image is loaded on your screen, the site that actually hosts the image gets a 'hit' and that traffic takes a bite out of that sites bandwidth; and the larger the file, the bigger the bite. This is why some sites discourage and/or disable hotlinking completely, because they're not getting ad revenues, etc for that type of traffic.

I know they can track whether traffic is external or internal...what I'm not sure about is whether they can dynamically downsample and image based on that.

Harvey_G wrote in post #14073011
...I host my images on SmugMug. When I look at them on the SmugMug site, they look critically sharp but often when I post them to a forum, they don't appear as sharp when displayed....

Not your imagination.

Log into Smugmug, go to SETTINGS for your galleries and look at SHARPENING. You'll see that images are sharpened by default and you can change the settings to your liking.

teekay wrote in post #14078234
Not your imagination.

Log into Smugmug, go to SETTINGS for your galleries and look at SHARPENING. You'll see that images are sharpened by default and you can change the settings to your liking.

I have seen that. The problem is that when viewed on Smugmug, yes they are sharp, but when linked to Smugmug and posted elsewhere, like here, they loose something. If I take the an image that I export from Lightroom to my desktop, then upload that image both to smugmug and here they look different. It looks the same when viewed on Smugmug itself and here but when hotlinked to smugmug and posted here it looses something. It seems the sharpening setting only applies to the image when viewed on smugmug itself.

teekay wrote in post #14078234
Not your imagination.

Log into Smugmug, go to SETTINGS for your galleries and look at SHARPENING. You'll see that images are sharpened by default and you can change the settings to your liking.

Went there but saw nothing about sharpening. Am I missing something?

On the right side top there is a TOOLS drop down menu. Drop it down and under the sub title THIS GALLERY select GALLERY SETTINGS. A new page will open, scroll down to near the bottom of that page and there are sharpening settings. This is what it says next to the title Shaprening. "Want soft portraits? Sharp wildlife? Originals aren't altered, just new display copies." I think it only applies to the images you see on the smugmug site not any linked images.

Grizz wrote in post #14080149
On the right side top there is a TOOLS drop down menu. Drop it down and under the sub title THIS GALLERY select GALLERY SETTINGS. A new page will open, scroll down to near the bottom of that page and there are sharpening settings. This is what it says next to the title Shaprening. "Want soft portraits? Sharp wildlife? Originals aren't altered, just new display copies." I think it only applies to the images you see on the smugmug site not any linked images.

Gotcha..... thanks.

Grizz wrote in post #14080149
On the right side top there is a TOOLS drop down menu. Drop it down and under the sub title THIS GALLERY select GALLERY SETTINGS. A new page will open, scroll down to near the bottom of that page and there are sharpening settings. This is what it says next to the title Shaprening. "Want soft portraits? Sharp wildlife? Originals aren't altered, just new display copies." I think it only applies to the images you see on the smugmug site not any linked images.

I tried to reset the sharpen and it seems to do nothing and I have a PRO membership. No clue why it is not changing anything.

I've just compared screen captures of one of my images when viewed on the Smugmug site and the same image when viewed through a link. I can't see any difference, so maybe it depends where the link is posted.

BTW I guess this is all a little off topic for the BIRDS forum.

teekay wrote in post #14080862
BTW I guess this is all a little off topic for the BIRDS forum.

Perhaps, but this is one of the busiest forums where images are posted and where others may have experienced the same phenomenon.