Pulling my hair out now, IQ 0/10

Hi,
I posted a few weeks ago about my Flickr shots being of poorer quality than what I see in LR3. I'm not sure if people mis-understood me and just confused this with Flickr compression. I have been posting on Flickr for years and never had any issues. This is a recent thing. I took some shots last night.
7d, ISO 100, F13, tripod, live view, shutter release AND 10 sec timer.
I went to put an image on Flickr, but deleted it as it was rubbish. I am not happy with anything from the last few weeks/months. What can I have done to alter what I see in LR3 to what I see when uploaded. I do expect some degredation but this is way beyond that
I typically export from LR to a folder on my hard drive. I save at 1024 longest side, 150kb max. There I upload to Flickr.
Help me please, this is spoiling my photography at the mo..........
Ian

how about trying a different free image hosting site like imageshack, or razzi (I don't know very many image hosting sites)? Then you can post links to both sites (the alternate and your flickr) and compare the difference. Or uploading the resized image to yousendit or dropbox for us to download and a link to the image on flickr?

Also, what sizes are you looking at when you're comparing the flickr version to the LR version? You should be looking at the original size (1024x????), to remove flickr's compression from the equation (I'm guessing you already are doing that).

What exactly is the problem with the flickr images? Is it color? Sharpening? pixelation? posterization? loss of image detail?

I tried uploading a picture (resized to 1024 on the longest edge) and uploaded both the flickr and razzi and then viewed the largest size of the image available. I used view image to view just the image and I didn't find any significant differences between razzi, flickr and the img in windows photo viewer. I converted my processed TIFF to png and uploaded that (I use TIFF because it's not lossy and it saves the exif data--png doesn't do it very well from my experience).

Post one here as the 150kb is the file size limit here as well.

I'm right there with you, Ian. *Something* being done on the Flickr end, when posting images like that, is softening images more so than it used to. I can see it when viewing a posted image, side by side with the same image directly on Flickr.

Unfortunately, I don't see that there's anything to 'do' since it appears to be coming FROM Flickr that's the problem. I'm ready to start posting a smaller sized 'preview' image that folks can click over to view the normal or larger sizes in the photostream itself.

I don't know anything about Flickr, but I am aware that different sites show images very differently. This site we are on right now discussing this is poor for my images, which look good elsewhere.

So there is some variability but how or why I've not got a clue.

Can you take a screenshot of the image on Flickr, and also one of your originals as a LR3 screenshot, so we can have a look at what you are experiencing?

I've noticed the same thing and haven't really thought too much about it. The exact same image, hosted on Flickr and posted to two different forums, will often look worse on one forum than on the other. Click through to the Flickr lightbox and it looks just fine.

Wilt wrote in post #14795002
Can you take a screenshot of the image on Flickr, and also one of your originals as a LR3 screenshot, so we can have a look at what you are experiencing?

When I have some time, tonight, I'll do as ohataO suggests earlier, and post a Flickr image along with the same image on my dropbox.

Ok,
I have taken this shot from my 'keepers' folder to show what I mean. Unfortunately, it looks the same as my Flickr.......... It is showing as 128 kb, 684x1024 px. I did try to reduce the sizes down to 800 px on the longest size to see if that helped, it didn't !!
If I try to zoom in it seems heavy pixelated and soft. The eye is a classic example, it looks OOF but it isn't in LR or in the origional I saved. Also the bokeh is extremely harsh in this shot, not so in the other version.
So, it seems it's not Flickr to blame, it's happening here on POTN and I tried TP in the UK too, they're all the same.

I can't see anything wrong with that image. It looks colorful and reasonably sharp. Have you checked your monitor settings, native resolution?

Ah-HA....So from my end, it looks like a confluence of my moving to a larger monitor and having to zoom in to be able to read the forums. If I resize an image to 1024, view it directly in the browser, and open the image at 1024 on Flickr in another tab they look the same. <shrug>

It turns out that the resolution that Flickr displays, by default, is higher res than 1024; which explains why it looks better in one location or the other.

I had the same issue, I have dual boot running XP and Linux Mint.

On XP my pictures look like crap when I upload them to flick but when I boot up into linux they look just as they do in lightroom.

Bots OS have the same browser and resolution but the pictures just lose quality when I open them up in windows.

Try looking at your flickr from someone else's computer or even from your phone.

I'm with Tim on this image, it seems fine on my end. I also looked at your Flickr and opened the first half dozen or images and they all looked OK to me.

tim wrote in post #14797509
I can't see anything wrong with that image. It looks colorful and reasonably sharp. Have you checked your monitor settings, native resolution?

Tim,

I DO see what Snydremark means with that shot. Its like mine here. Whereas the same shot of mine viewed via zenfolio is always fine. To me that proves its not down to monitor settings, its the sites, this one not being too good, at least with mine. Presumably Fklikr has the same issue.

Posting a shot here is absolutely pointless, there is no way for us to know what the image should of looked like.

Yes, flickr, and almost all image hosting sites have compression and skew colors/sharpness a bit, thats part of the deal, the only way to avoid this is to use your very own website.

It helps if you're exporting photos in sRGB as well, instead of aRGB as is more common for prints. (Maybe you accidentaly switched to aRGB? Maybe you're only viewing the RAW in LR and not taking the time to import the newly exported low-res ? Taking care to let LR actually import a perhaps duplicate?)

If you want to show us any difference, export it and host it across various places, maybe dropbox public while you're at it, and put them side by side.

Its the only way anyone would notice any difference, mind you theres even differences between browers, not to mention monitors. Trying to get a photo to show up perfectly on the web is a pointless venture.