5 ms·

From the article: "This is not exactly an unknown problem. Google constantly harps on optimizing images, but Tumblr blindly reuses images that its users hand i

From the article: "This is not exactly an unknown problem. Google constantly harps on optimizing images, but Tumblr blindly reuses images that its users hand it. This makes me sad." There are tons of valid uses for the color profile and other metadata in PNG files. Generally, I don't want services dicking with this stuff (in some cases I don't care, but I don't want the service to decide when I do or don't because it is bound to decide wrong some of the time, so they should just leave my data alone). Onus should be on the content developer to save the image in a proper format and strip all metadata that isn't required. I don't want services I use stripping this stuff willy-nilly. Perhaps I want accurate color profile data in my PNGs so my tumblr followers can make accurate prints. Perhaps I want geolocation EXIF data in there because my blog is read by people who want to see this data, etc. tl;dr -- Don't listen to this guy, Tumblr (or anyone else). He makes the classic mistake of "because something isn't important to me, it has no use".

adgar 15y ago
Well, in the case of tumblr, most users are not technically proficient enough to know what's going on there. Plus, they certainly don't care about tumblr's costs, unless their pictures load noticeably slowly. And even then... well, let's just say most tumblrs are not exactly carefully-maintained gardens. So tumblr is likely serving tons of wasted data, slower than necessary, harming most of their user's experiences by preserving that data. Consider mobile users with limited data plans - they likely don't feel much sympathy with your argument. Compromise: tumblr receives the image, compresses it, and shows the result to the user saying "how does it look?", as well as a disclosure triangle to show the list of optimizations it made, noting that if the picture looks wrong, to click it. When that disclosure triangle opens, it also offers a button saying something to the effect of "use what I uploaded, damn it!" The vast majority who don't care click right through, those who do have a simple interface to see exactly what's going on with their image, and X thousands of pages can load quicker and save millions of people's bandwidth (and tumblr a bunch of money). Mobile users don't waste money on useless data and their images load much faster.
sbierwagen 15y ago
There is no possible reason why you would need metadata for any kind of thumbnail, much less a user icon. In any event, tumblr already resizes all large images to a maximum of 1280 pixels on either axis. If you were very concerned with maintaining images in their original state, this would be driving you up a wall. Good thing it's trivially easy to use alternative image hosting sites, like flickr or photobucket, on tumblr.
- lobster_johnson 15y ago
  There's metadata and there's metadata. Sure, EXIF, IPTC and XMP data is usually entirely useless for web images. But colour profile information actually has the information needed to correctly render the colours in the image. You could argue that small thumbnails don't matter. I would agree for small sizes, but as the size increases, it becomes important to preserve the ICC profile data. With bandwidth having become cheap, and processing power having become abundant, these days it's often appropriate to downscale images in the browser; so instead of storing thumbnail as 40x40, 60x60, 100x100 etc. depending on the use cases, just store a flexible version (say, 150x150) and let the browser scale. At that resolution, I would keep the ICC data.
  - vidarh 15y ago
    Does any web browsers actually use that information?
    - lobster_johnson 15y ago
      Yep. Safari (since 2.0), Chrome (since 15, I believe), Firefox (supported since 3.0, but only enabled in 3.5 and later) and IE (since 9.0) all use embedded ICC metadata. No idea about other browsers.
  - thristian 15y ago
    Well, except that this particular color-profile was for the sRGB color space, which is exactly what every browser and image-viewer on the planet defaults to if no color-profile is supplied. It'd be like shipping an ASCII text file with a Latin1-to-Unicode mapping table.

adgar 15y ago

Well, in the case of tumblr, most users are not technically proficient enough to know what's going on there. Plus, they certainly don't care about tumblr's costs, unless their pictures load noticeably slowly. And even then... well, let's just say most tumblrs are not exactly carefully-maintained gardens. So tumblr is likely serving tons of wasted data, slower than necessary, harming most of their user's experiences by preserving that data. Consider mobile users with limited data plans - they likely don't feel much sympathy with your argument. Compromise: tumblr receives the image, compresses it, and shows the result to the user saying "how does it look?", as well as a disclosure triangle to show the list of optimizations it made, noting that if the picture looks wrong, to click it. When that disclosure triangle opens, it also offers a button saying something to the effect of "use what I uploaded, damn it!" The vast majority who don't care click right through, those who do have a simple interface to see exactly what's going on with their image, and X thousands of pages can load quicker and save millions of people's bandwidth (and tumblr a bunch of money). Mobile users don't waste money on useless data and their images load much faster.

sbierwagen 15y ago

There is no possible reason why you would need metadata for any kind of thumbnail, much less a user icon. In any event, tumblr already resizes all large images to a maximum of 1280 pixels on either axis. If you were very concerned with maintaining images in their original state, this would be driving you up a wall. Good thing it's trivially easy to use alternative image hosting sites, like flickr or photobucket, on tumblr.

lobster_johnson 15y ago
There's metadata and there's metadata. Sure, EXIF, IPTC and XMP data is usually entirely useless for web images. But colour profile information actually has the information needed to correctly render the colours in the image. You could argue that small thumbnails don't matter. I would agree for small sizes, but as the size increases, it becomes important to preserve the ICC profile data. With bandwidth having become cheap, and processing power having become abundant, these days it's often appropriate to downscale images in the browser; so instead of storing thumbnail as 40x40, 60x60, 100x100 etc. depending on the use cases, just store a flexible version (say, 150x150) and let the browser scale. At that resolution, I would keep the ICC data.
- vidarh 15y ago
  Does any web browsers actually use that information?
  - lobster_johnson 15y ago
    Yep. Safari (since 2.0), Chrome (since 15, I believe), Firefox (supported since 3.0, but only enabled in 3.5 and later) and IE (since 9.0) all use embedded ICC metadata. No idea about other browsers.
- thristian 15y ago
  Well, except that this particular color-profile was for the sRGB color space, which is exactly what every browser and image-viewer on the planet defaults to if no color-profile is supplied. It'd be like shipping an ASCII text file with a Latin1-to-Unicode mapping table.