5 ms·

Do you need a 12MP photo of a goat?

23 points by BigBalli 6y ago

enkrs 6y ago
I must confess I did something similar a long time ago, when hard drive space was expensive. I converted all my 4MP photos to 1024x768 - that was the biggest screen resolution imaginable at the time on the "huge" 17" monitors. Everything bigger was just megapixel race. Fast forward 10 years and I still have all the resized photos in my phone (cloud), but even the small phone screen is so good that you can easily see the difference. I've also noticed that people's habits change, I see more and more people flipping trough pictures on their phones and zooming in on the ones they like. Who knows what picture viewing habits we will have in 10 years. Maybe with some VR implants we will want to enjoy our old photos in all glorious 12 megapixels.
- gonzo41 6y ago
  Not for nothing, 35mm film contains 87 megapixels of data. So even printed small in a 4 X 6 Photo you could make it large and have a really good image. https://www.kenrockwell.com/tech/film-resolution.html https://www.kenrockwell.com/tech/film-resolution.html The storage is worth it. Especially if i can just dump it somewhere in the cloud.
  - iforgotpassword 6y ago
    Theoretically, under ideal conditions. I scanned my childhood photos shot on a Minolta at 5000dpi and in the end this was overkill for 99% of photos. Remember the time before autofocus? Yes, 99% of photos were more or less just quick shots of people/kids in motion so there was never time to perfectly adjust focus. There are a couple of steady portrait shots that look just amazing though. Maybe those ai upscalers will save the day in another decade or so.
- BigBalli 6y ago
  That's a good point, didn't think of it... Might go back to keep highnres lol
- m463 6y ago
  I got a funny thought reading your post. We have these deep fakes based on data from a still photo. Some day that 12MP goat picture will be the data for a pet-based deep fake of your dog or cat. :)
anigbrowl 6y ago
At current prices of approximately $20/terabyte I don't really care about storage space any more. I take an average of 500 pictures a month and store a lot of other data, and though I am running out of space on my storage drive right now it took years to fill those terabytes and adding another drive doesn't feel like a big deal. Do I need most of this data? Unlikely, but there are times I find myself going back to images or other data from years ago because of something I overlooked at the time. If I downsize pictures, there's no way to get that information back, whereas space is cheap. I wonder if the author might not be better off with a good vector converter, which would save plenty of space but still provide beautiful image quality at any scale, now or in the future.
- nefitty 6y ago
  What do you take photos of and with what? I think that my lack of a storage strategy is part of what has held me back from really pushing myself to produce more data/art/music. I imagine a sort of life logging habit with photos of things I want to document. The issue then becomes discoverability and organization...
  - anigbrowl 6y ago
    A mix of journalistic, nature, and sentimental photographs - sometimes with my phone, but mostly with DSLR cameras. I don't spent time tagging or cataloguing, I just put things in folders by date, and sometimes copy them into a second folder by subject if they're particularly important to me. I have a very memory for images and context so it's not much effort for me to go back and look things up, though I am excited by the possibilities of AI image tagging.
- iforgotpassword 6y ago
  Yes, this sounds short-sighted. They seem to be a mac user so I can only guess it might have to do with lack of expandability of the used hardware? I have two 12tb drives in my home server and 2tb offsite backup for important stuff (=photos and some documents). Scaling down photos never even crossed my mind.
petecooper 6y ago
>Not only did I need to batch resize all images, I also wanted to preserve all image metadata and EXIF data (date, time, location, etc). I was unable to find a tool to perform such a basic but crucial task so I set out to build it myself. It looks like the author is using a Mac, so XnConvert would be just fine for this task: https://www.xnview.com/en/xnconvert/ https://www.xnview.com/en/xnconvert/
- mFixman 6y ago
  Why not use Imagemagick? It's by far the simplest and most practical tool for image manipulation.
  - petecooper 6y ago
    Some people may prefer a GUI workflow.
  - BigBalli 6y ago
    not preinstalled. Wanted something anyone could run out of the box.
- BigBalli 6y ago
  not free.
  - petecooper 6y ago
    I take your point about pre-installed applications/libraries, but XnConvert is free for non-commercial use according to their site. It appears to be freeware rather than open source.
aaron695 6y ago
> Do you need a 12MP photo of a goat? DVDs are only 720 and 26 frames or something. What is 'quality' changes. When your tv is your wall maybe you will need that 10 meg. You probably won't care about the goat though. Kinda needs a person in it to keep its value. But whatever's some people like random goats and suns doing things. Possible to use a better codec? H266 out yet?
bellyfullofbac 6y ago
Seeing the title, I was anticipating something more exciting than a run-of-the-mill resize script... Namely I thought, did someone make a clever tool that recognises "boring" pictures and would reduce their size? You'd want high res for a group photo of say 100 employees (not that we'll have that in 2020-2021...) or a panorama with interesting details if you zoom in. For the goat, of course zooming in you'd just see its fur, or individual leaves of grass, so reducing its resolution wouldn't matter much.
dTal 6y ago
Yes! Show me the hi-res goat! What a disappointing article. I was all excited...
etblg 6y ago
Do you really need a photo of a goat? I'm not the author so I wouldn't really know, but if you have aa picture of the back of a goat in shade and you're considering destructively resizing it to save space, maybe it's the fact that it's a mediocre photo of the back of a goat that's the issue, and not the size. If you really want to come back in the future and reflect on your fond memories of seeing the back of a goat, keep the original size and store it in cheap cold storage. If not, maybe get rid of it?
- BigBalli 6y ago
  I cropped the part I care about before posting.
tabtab 6y ago
That's a b-a-a-a-a-a-d request.

23 points by BigBalli 6y ago

I must confess I did something similar a long time ago, when hard drive space was expensive. I converted all my 4MP photos to 1024x768 - that was the biggest screen resolution imaginable at the time on the "huge" 17" monitors. Everything bigger was just megapixel race. Fast forward 10 years and I still have all the resized photos in my phone (cloud), but even the small phone screen is so good that you can easily see the difference. I've also noticed that people's habits change, I see more and more people flipping trough pictures on their phones and zooming in on the ones they like. Who knows what picture viewing habits we will have in 10 years. Maybe with some VR implants we will want to enjoy our old photos in all glorious 12 megapixels.

gonzo41 6y ago
Not for nothing, 35mm film contains 87 megapixels of data. So even printed small in a 4 X 6 Photo you could make it large and have a really good image. https://www.kenrockwell.com/tech/film-resolution.html https://www.kenrockwell.com/tech/film-resolution.html The storage is worth it. Especially if i can just dump it somewhere in the cloud.
- iforgotpassword 6y ago
  Theoretically, under ideal conditions. I scanned my childhood photos shot on a Minolta at 5000dpi and in the end this was overkill for 99% of photos. Remember the time before autofocus? Yes, 99% of photos were more or less just quick shots of people/kids in motion so there was never time to perfectly adjust focus. There are a couple of steady portrait shots that look just amazing though. Maybe those ai upscalers will save the day in another decade or so.
BigBalli 6y ago
That's a good point, didn't think of it... Might go back to keep highnres lol
m463 6y ago
I got a funny thought reading your post. We have these deep fakes based on data from a still photo. Some day that 12MP goat picture will be the data for a pet-based deep fake of your dog or cat. :)

anigbrowl 6y ago

At current prices of approximately $20/terabyte I don't really care about storage space any more. I take an average of 500 pictures a month and store a lot of other data, and though I am running out of space on my storage drive right now it took years to fill those terabytes and adding another drive doesn't feel like a big deal. Do I need most of this data? Unlikely, but there are times I find myself going back to images or other data from years ago because of something I overlooked at the time. If I downsize pictures, there's no way to get that information back, whereas space is cheap. I wonder if the author might not be better off with a good vector converter, which would save plenty of space but still provide beautiful image quality at any scale, now or in the future.

nefitty 6y ago
What do you take photos of and with what? I think that my lack of a storage strategy is part of what has held me back from really pushing myself to produce more data/art/music. I imagine a sort of life logging habit with photos of things I want to document. The issue then becomes discoverability and organization...
- anigbrowl 6y ago
  A mix of journalistic, nature, and sentimental photographs - sometimes with my phone, but mostly with DSLR cameras. I don't spent time tagging or cataloguing, I just put things in folders by date, and sometimes copy them into a second folder by subject if they're particularly important to me. I have a very memory for images and context so it's not much effort for me to go back and look things up, though I am excited by the possibilities of AI image tagging.
iforgotpassword 6y ago
Yes, this sounds short-sighted. They seem to be a mac user so I can only guess it might have to do with lack of expandability of the used hardware? I have two 12tb drives in my home server and 2tb offsite backup for important stuff (=photos and some documents). Scaling down photos never even crossed my mind.

petecooper 6y ago

>Not only did I need to batch resize all images, I also wanted to preserve all image metadata and EXIF data (date, time, location, etc). I was unable to find a tool to perform such a basic but crucial task so I set out to build it myself. It looks like the author is using a Mac, so XnConvert would be just fine for this task: https://www.xnview.com/en/xnconvert/ https://www.xnview.com/en/xnconvert/

mFixman 6y ago
Why not use Imagemagick? It's by far the simplest and most practical tool for image manipulation.
- petecooper 6y ago
  Some people may prefer a GUI workflow.
- BigBalli 6y ago
  not preinstalled. Wanted something anyone could run out of the box.
BigBalli 6y ago
not free.
- petecooper 6y ago
  I take your point about pre-installed applications/libraries, but XnConvert is free for non-commercial use according to their site. It appears to be freeware rather than open source.

aaron695 6y ago

> Do you need a 12MP photo of a goat? DVDs are only 720 and 26 frames or something. What is 'quality' changes. When your tv is your wall maybe you will need that 10 meg. You probably won't care about the goat though. Kinda needs a person in it to keep its value. But whatever's some people like random goats and suns doing things. Possible to use a better codec? H266 out yet?

bellyfullofbac 6y ago

Seeing the title, I was anticipating something more exciting than a run-of-the-mill resize script... Namely I thought, did someone make a clever tool that recognises "boring" pictures and would reduce their size? You'd want high res for a group photo of say 100 employees (not that we'll have that in 2020-2021...) or a panorama with interesting details if you zoom in. For the goat, of course zooming in you'd just see its fur, or individual leaves of grass, so reducing its resolution wouldn't matter much.

dTal 6y ago

Yes! Show me the hi-res goat! What a disappointing article. I was all excited...

etblg 6y ago

Do you really need a photo of a goat? I'm not the author so I wouldn't really know, but if you have aa picture of the back of a goat in shade and you're considering destructively resizing it to save space, maybe it's the fact that it's a mediocre photo of the back of a goat that's the issue, and not the size. If you really want to come back in the future and reflect on your fond memories of seeing the back of a goat, keep the original size and store it in cheap cold storage. If not, maybe get rid of it?

BigBalli 6y ago
I cropped the part I care about before posting.

tabtab 6y ago

That's a b-a-a-a-a-a-d request.