4w ago

Image uploads to PF-- what size should I be aiming for..?

So-- I would love nothing better than to host every image on Imgur and call it a day, except that Imgur is just lol* with that business. I.e., in some cases, I have stuff that's been there for ~10yrs with no issue, and then there's a bunch of other stuff that routinely gets deleted after 3-4mos or so.

Not trying to ramble here, but my concern is that I don't want to weigh down our host, and instead want to find the 'right pocket,' i.e. a good-size image file that let's me show off our image content, but isn't a burden upon our host.

Plus of course, sometimes showing off a certain series requires ~10 images or so, meaning the image-serving requirements are 10x the nominal requirement.

In cases like that, I have no problem uploading such content to Imgur, even if it's not going to last long, but... I kinda want to figure out how I should handle these things, if that makes sense...

Thank you for any and all advice.

8 comments

If all you want is efficient web quality I'd highly recommend grabbing the cjpegli binary out of the latest static release from the libjxl repo and using the following command to slim down images with near-zero visual quality loss: cjpegli -q 90 -p 2 "input.jpg" "output.jpg". It uses modern encoding techniques derived from the next-gen JPEG-XL project and stuffs the result back into a regular old JPEG container. Replace "90" with e.g. 90/92/95 depending on the quality level you want to target. After playing around with some of the quality levels and checking the resultant filesizes you should be able to get a feel for what you can reasonably get away with for the resolution and makeup of a particular image. If you still can't get it small enough, you probably need to start reducing the resolution as well.
In terms of what size an average image should be for Threadiverse purposes, I'd shoot for 0.5-1MB. If it's just a meme or something with value not intrinsic to its image quality I'd aim lower, whereas if it's something OC like photography I'd bump the quality higher (or maybe have a web-quality version available on click with a higher quality version hosted elsewhere).
I appreciate the care you're showing here.
If you upload something with a width or height greater than 2000 pixels it will get resized to be within that limit. That stops the most egregious wastage.
It depends on the content, a bit:
Quality stuff like https://piefed.social/c/artporn will be kept online 'forever' but I've set things up so that quite a lot of communities automatically delete posts after 6 - 12 months. Spam as many memes as you want I don't care they're going away after a while anyway.
- Both a late reply and an 'oops' on my part: what I meant about 'Image size' was not image dimensions, but file size. So far I've kept it very low when posting here, but just now I made a post with a ~411k uploaded JPG. Sound good, or should I aim for either more or less?
  Also, based on your comments, I understand that since my community is on the flagship instance, I can expect such images to last as long as PieFed.Social does. Please correct if that's wrong, and thank you for what you do(!)
I convert images to the WEBP format, and often also resize them at 75% and compress them at 75% quality.
Even just resaving a JPG or PNG as WEBP can result in an impressive file size reduction. E.g. a movie screenshot in PNG format at 438.5kb, saved as a Webp at just 10.0kb! With little noticeable difference in image quality.
I try not to post anything over 100kb, and will even convert to WEBP any images in JPG or PNG under 100kb, to save hosts every possible kb.
The Lemmy front end Tesseract does this function (convert to Webp, compress to 75% quality) automatically for you. Could be good if PieFed did the same.
(I also have a Pixelfed account where I sometimes post images I'll use in PieFed, but that's only because PieFed currently doesn't allow multiple image uploads or uploading in comments. In fact, I often go back to Lemmy when I want to do that kind of thing, e.g. movie posts like this https://lemmy.ca/post/46999890 )
Not exactly an answer to your question, but if it's helpful, I've basically been using Pixelfed as my image hosting. Not sure how correct this is but my thought was that they're expecting heavy image use and are thus probably more equipped for it? Then I just use the direct link to the image in the link field of my post, and it shows up the same as if I'd uploaded here instead of as a link. Presumably you know that part though since you've been Imgur'ing, sorry.
- Ugh, sorry for the late reply. So, just to be clear, when you say "PixelFed," I'm seeing two main starting points, i.e. PixelFed.Social And PixelFed.Org.
  Any advice on where to begin..?
  
  I'm on pxlmo.com, but any of them work really. Usually when picking an instance, I just find something on this list that isn't too big or too small. Like in the high hundreds/low thousands ideally.

8 comments