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I've recently uploaded two photos to the gallery. Both images prior to upload were sharp and in focus; but once uploaded, the images look blurry and out of focus. If I go to the image in the gallery and zoom in the image snaps into focus. I'm using a Nikon digital camera (can't remember the model number).

Any idea why this might be happening?

Image for reference.

Is it just because the version that gets posted to the forum is lower quality so that people viewing it in the forum (opposed to the gallery) don't have to download a high res version?

While 56kbps isn't a thing anymore, I imagine people viewing from mobile devices might not want to be downloading pics that are in the megabytes range without knowing.

Yes, the images are reduced in quality to save on bandwidth, but I think what you have going on is something else. In my experience uploading images with a very large resolution causes the situation you are experiencing. You're uploading images at 3871x2177, which is larger than the gallery software seems to like.



As you can see from the preview pictures, the largest image looks objectively the worst when resized into a medium size preview. The smaller ones look dramatically better. This is an algorithmic shortcoming. Of course, the smaller resolution images look much worse when you scroll in, because they are much lower resolution. So, what to do?

If people are mostly going to be viewing your images as-is in the gallery, I'd suggest resizing to 1920x1200 max before uploading. You're going to be peeking through a 800x450 porthole, anyway.

If you're going to be embedding your images inside forum postings or articles for use on the site, then I'd recommend still using 1920x1200 or thereabouts anyway, but picking the full size option when picking a link and embedding them full size.

Thank you for the information, I'm glad it's something straightforward.

I'll have to look into resizing my photos in the future.

If you don't already have software for this, The Gimp is free, runs on pretty much all desktop OS's, and pretty good. It's got a bit of a learning curve for complex stuff but resizing is very simple.

If you just paste in the forum code for the full sized image the forum will resize it to fit the thread without making it blurry.



Great paint job by the way

 Brother Castor wrote:
If you just paste in the forum code for the full sized image the forum will resize it to fit the thread without making it blurry.

Spoiler:

Great paint job by the way

Strange, that's what I've been doing. Bottom right at the gallery image, right?

Quote my post and yours and look at the different URL in the forum code I pasted.

 Brother Castor wrote:
If you just paste in the forum code for the full sized image the forum will resize it to fit the thread without making it blurry.

It will not resize the image to fit in the thread unless it's in a spoiler tag. If the image exceeds your current display resolution it will add a horizontal scroll bar.

 Ouze wrote:

It will not resize the image to fit in the thread unless it's in a spoiler tag. If the image exceeds your current display resolution it will add a horizontal scroll bar.

What browser are you using? On Chrome it resizes without spoiler tags:



I have noticed that automatic resizing only works after submitting though, preview shows it at it's original resolution.

Oh man, I am not sure I ever bothered to submit after seeing a giant image break the thread in preview - this whole time I have been spoilering for nothing!

Yeah, I only worked all this out after much trial and error having seen that some people clearly already knew the secret of posting non-blurry gallery photos!

Mr Nobody wrote:I've recently uploaded two photos to the gallery. Both images prior to upload were sharp and in focus; but once uploaded, the images look blurry and out of focus. If I go to the image in the gallery and zoom in the image snaps into focus. I'm using a Nikon digital camera (can't remember the model number).

Any idea why this might be happening?

Image for reference.

Spoiler:

Brother Castor wrote:If you just paste in the forum code for the full sized image the forum will resize it to fit the thread without making it blurry.

Spoiler:

Great paint job by the way

okay, so it looks like you just have to cut out the descriptive from the code with percentile signs and replace an underscore with a dash. I'll have to remember that.Gallery image is still weird, but I'll just have to resize the image before uploading.

I don't know how you managed to figure that out but I am impressed.

Resize AND sharpen before uploading.

Resizing in itself deletes data and often as not it will soften the final photo. However a quick sharpen before and after resizing will help you preserve the sharpness; in fact done this way the shot will often appear sharper.

My camera puts out photos at around 5K pixels on the longest side and my method is

Sharpen
Resize to 2500 pixels on the longest side
sharpen
Resize to 1000 pixels on the longest side
sharpen

Note that the second and third sharpening passes are often very light and the last one is often a a very low value of sharpening. Basically just touching up after the resize.

Mr Nobody wrote:

okay, so it looks like you just have to cut out the descriptive from the code with percentile signs and replace an underscore with a dash. I'll have to remember that.Gallery image is still weird, but I'll just have to resize the image before uploading.

If you select full size from the list above the code you copy from the gallery it will give you the correct URL.