Hi; I'm in a pet loss group that allows photo albums of our pets, but notice that some photos are so blurry they are hard to look at. When I tried posting photos of my own departed cat, mine were so blurry I removed them. Is there an optimum file size or something? How can we make our photos clear for viewing? Thanks so much!

On Sun, Jan 19, 2025 at 03:20 PM, SquaredyCat wrote:

When I tried posting photos of my own departed cat, mine were so blurry I removed them.

In the album slideshow mode, all photos are up/downscaled to fit the size of the slideshow container. This can cause any small photos in the album to look blurry when viewed on a large monitor, while the same slideshow would very likely look fine on your phone.

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Suggestions have been made to the effect that a photo should never be displayed at an image scale exceeding its own resolution. To date, it has not been acted upon, and I suspect doing so might -- at best -- bring forth a flurry of complaints from those who didn't expect it to be changed.

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Is there an optimum file size or something? How can we make our photos clear for viewing?

For best clarity on all devices, the bigger the better; but as with most everything, there are tradeoffs. Response time of the initial album display can get really slow if you have to wait for a bunch of big photos to load and get rendered. Bitmapped formats in particular can take just about forever.

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Note also that the group Owner may have limitations on image dimensions so as to avoid running over the group's storage allocation. Most of my groups rescale Photo uploads to not more than 1024 pixels in the long dimension, but if your members are going to routinely view photos on a 1080p display, 2048 might be a better choice.

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If you're not in a position to make these changes yourself, the best you can do is petition the group admins to do so.

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Hope this helps,

Bruce?

thank you for your response. that gives me something to go on. I thought I would try to solve it on my own first - ours is a subgroup of another group. If the restrictions are for 30 gigabytes of storage for both groups, we probably need to keep our files very small. I'm on an old desktop with a large monitor so that may be my problem.? I will contact the admins to see what can be done. I'd be willing to pay something for the better photo quality and maybe others would too. But first, I'll try rescaling a photo or two and see if maybe my files are too big at 1-2 mb a photo.

thanks, Bruce Bowman and also to Christos Psarras, who I forgot to tag in the previous response.

Both of your responses give me things to try and if those fail, I will ask the mods or admins to see what the settings are. Really appreciate the responses. I think that scaling my pictures to the 1080 or 2048 pixels will be the first thing I will try. Will message back here if that is a success!

On Sun, Jan 19, 2025 at 09:36 PM, SquaredyCat wrote:

what the settings are

Another bit of troubleshooting that you can do.? In an album, find one of the photos that looks blurry to you.? Below that photo, click Download to see what it looks like at full size.? If it's small, but clear, that says that it's being resized smaller so that it blurs when shown full screen.

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Duane

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thanks for that good tip, Duane! I would think it'd be the opposite - that resizing bigger would make it blur. These pictures don't seem very large. So that could be a setting for resolution that the mods have put into place so we don't go over our storage capacity. I will try it and see what happens. I think you're saying that it'll download at full size but if it's small and clear, resizing it might make it blurry on the site - peryhaps partly due to resolution. I wonder if a file can be too big; especially if groups only have the 30 gig storage for everyone. That isn't very much for a group with thousands of members. I'll try that before resizing any of my own photos. I suppose pixels would also make a difference on how things look, depending on storage capacity and resolution settings. (ie high-res vs low-res).?

On Tue, Jan 21, 2025 at 08:19 PM, SquaredyCat wrote:

thanks for that good tip, Duane! I would think it'd be the opposite - that resizing bigger would make it blur.

I think that is what he suggested - that resizing bigger (if it was small) makes it blur.? The detail is lacking in the small photo size, which becomes apparent when you enlarge it to fir your screen.

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If the online copy is small, then either it was uploaded that way, or the group's settings caused it to be downsized when it was uploaded, to meet that group's size limit.? That is a setting controlled by the group's Owners/Moderators.? Thst setting ranges from 140x140 maximum, to 4096x4096 maximum, to unlimited.

I think you're saying that it'll download at full size ...

It will download at the size that it is currently stored in the group.? If it was downsized when it was uploaded to the group, you can't undo that.

... especially if groups only have the 30 gig storage for everyone.

Some have much less than 30 Gigs.? Many groups have only 1 GByte maximum.

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Regards,

Andy I

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