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Thanks so much for writing smugline. :) FWIW, we stopped rotating your Originals (which we did in a lossless fashion back in the day) awhile back, and now pre

Thanks so much for writing smugline. :) FWIW, we stopped rotating your Originals (which we did in a lossless fashion back in the day) awhile back, and now preserve them exactly as you uploaded them. Your MD5 hashes and byte counts match, and of course, people can get them back whenever they'd like.

gingerlime 11y ago
That's interesting to know. I suggested it (or at least storing the original MD5 hash) but was stonewalled by Nick from your dev support, saying "I checked with our developers and in the case that we rotate an image, we do not store the original MD5 of the non-rotated image. This is not something that we are going to change at this time.". I've seen fairly recent reports[0] saying this still happens (although, to be fair, your support indicated that it might be a bug). What about videos though? From looking at the (v1.3) API response, I can't be sure that the original file is preserved. Sorry, didn't mean to hijack this, but since you chimed in, I hope to highlight some issues that I saw. Happy to share more from my personal, very limited, experience supporting smugline with you. If you wish to take this offline. [0] http://www.dgrin.com/showthread.php?p=1999917 http://www.dgrin.com/showthread.php?p=1999917
- UberMouse 11y ago
  onethumb says here in this comment that they recompress videos for streaming https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9939270 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9939270 Now I'm not sure if that means, it's recompressed when it's streamed, or if it's recompressed when it's uploading, for streaming.
- onethumb 11y ago
  Yeah, not only do we preserve the MD5 of the uploaded file for photos, we preserve the uploaded file itself fully intact. So getting the Original back will result in exactly the same bytes and thus the same MD5 hash. (You're correct that we used to apply some transformations to the photos that didn't materially change the pixel content, but changed bytes and thus the hash. We don't anymore). For videos, we don't preserve the uploaded video for a variety of reasons, but the primary being that our intent is to support Internet-deliverable formats & filesizes. Customers regularly upload videos that vastly exceed Blu-ray bitrates (literally hundreds of megabits-per-second) that just aren't Internet-useful. That's different from a JPEG, GIF, or PNG where the original file is Internet-useful, deliverable, and makes a meaningful difference. That file is very useful for sharing, which is what we do - we share. We don't consider ourselves to be a backup service, and there are lots of great backup services out there to choose from that would love to take a 3GB 5 minute video. We take extraordinary care with our customers photos & videos, but we're a photo & video sharing service, not a backup service.

gingerlime 11y ago

That's interesting to know. I suggested it (or at least storing the original MD5 hash) but was stonewalled by Nick from your dev support, saying "I checked with our developers and in the case that we rotate an image, we do not store the original MD5 of the non-rotated image. This is not something that we are going to change at this time.". I've seen fairly recent reports[0] saying this still happens (although, to be fair, your support indicated that it might be a bug). What about videos though? From looking at the (v1.3) API response, I can't be sure that the original file is preserved. Sorry, didn't mean to hijack this, but since you chimed in, I hope to highlight some issues that I saw. Happy to share more from my personal, very limited, experience supporting smugline with you. If you wish to take this offline. [0] http://www.dgrin.com/showthread.php?p=1999917 http://www.dgrin.com/showthread.php?p=1999917

UberMouse 11y ago
onethumb says here in this comment that they recompress videos for streaming https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9939270 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9939270 Now I'm not sure if that means, it's recompressed when it's streamed, or if it's recompressed when it's uploading, for streaming.
onethumb 11y ago
Yeah, not only do we preserve the MD5 of the uploaded file for photos, we preserve the uploaded file itself fully intact. So getting the Original back will result in exactly the same bytes and thus the same MD5 hash. (You're correct that we used to apply some transformations to the photos that didn't materially change the pixel content, but changed bytes and thus the hash. We don't anymore). For videos, we don't preserve the uploaded video for a variety of reasons, but the primary being that our intent is to support Internet-deliverable formats & filesizes. Customers regularly upload videos that vastly exceed Blu-ray bitrates (literally hundreds of megabits-per-second) that just aren't Internet-useful. That's different from a JPEG, GIF, or PNG where the original file is Internet-useful, deliverable, and makes a meaningful difference. That file is very useful for sharing, which is what we do - we share. We don't consider ourselves to be a backup service, and there are lots of great backup services out there to choose from that would love to take a 3GB 5 minute video. We take extraordinary care with our customers photos & videos, but we're a photo & video sharing service, not a backup service.