Flickr Compressing / sharpening images

Cheesy feet

Cheesy feet

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Name
Ollie
Edit My Images
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I haven't used Flickr properly in a while.
I'm resizing my images to 1200 x 1200px. They look great in Photoshop, pin sharp, but not over the top. I upload them to flickr and this is the result that I get:

La Palma, Canaries - 30/03/14 by oamphotography, on Flickr
La Palma, Canaries - 30/03/14 by oamphotography, on Flickr

Full res test by oamphotography, on Flickr

Here's a full res image I uploaded for comparison, which has come out fine (as I see it on my screen).

Anyone got ideas on how to solve this?

I'm saving at 350PPI, but as a test I also uploaded them at 1200px and 72PPI, and they looked exactly the same.
 
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Firstly to get this out of the way - PPI means nothing unless you're printing,. You can't have Pixels Per Inch in a digital image because digital images don't have inches.

As for the sharpness it's going to vary a lot depending on how Flickr is displaying it, they used to have specific sizes and you could just check those looked okay but now they do some combination of that and dynamic resizing. Even if you sorted the sharpness the colours are going to be different for different screens and different calibrations of the same screen. And they'll probably end up changing the algorithm or the entirely photo page again at some point in the near future, leaving you back where you started.

I just put them up at whatever size I decided I wanted to (I think it was 720px on the short side so they fit my phone/tablet best) and accept they're not going to be exactly how I want them on every screen.

You could always adjust the sharpening for the specific files that you upload to Flickr.
 
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Since webpages display images at 72DPI/PPI (or the myth goes - apparently most screens support webpages with a much denser PPI these days), surely that's not true. If an image is less than 72PPI, would it not be reduced in quality? I couldn't tell the difference on my 1080P monitor, though.
Hmm, I recall Flickr never used to fiddle with images so much, it's a shame... They really do look awful compared to what I'm looking at. Since I can't see what they'll look like until I upload them to Flickr, I feel adjusting sharpening for uploads to Flickr will be quite difficult!
 
I think what you're seeing is merely a result of rescaling an image from 1200 x 816 down to 1024 x 696, which is the default display size on Flickr.

It looks better when you're uploading the original because there's much more data for the resizing algorithm to work with, so it looks better when reduced to 1024 x 696. Downloading and reducing your 1200 original in Photoshop down to 1024 doesn't look that great either.

I suspect the best results are obtained when you upload an original at 1024 wide, and probably it will work better if your original is 2048 wide for optimal scaling down (as it's an easy reduction scale or 2:1).
 
72 DPI is pretty much irrelevant these days, BTW.

It was the standard resolution for Apple monitors in the 80s and early 90s - so that you could scale off the screen with a ruler if necessary.
 
Musicman said:
I think what you're seeing is merely a result of rescaling an image from 1200 x 816 down to 1024 x 696, which is the default display size on Flickr.

It looks better when you're uploading the original because there's much more data for the resizing algorithm to work with, so it looks better when reduced to 1024 x 696. Downloading and reducing your 1200 original in Photoshop down to 1024 doesn't look that great either.

I suspect the best results are obtained when you upload an original at 1024 wide, and probably it will work better if your original is 2048 wide for optimal scaling down (as it's an easy reduction scale or 2:1).
Click to expand...
Musicman said:
72 DPI is pretty much irrelevant these days, BTW.

It was the standard resolution for Apple monitors in the 80s and early 90s - so that you could scale off the screen with a ruler if necessary.
Click to expand...

Hit the nail on the head, thanks dude.
 
What would comparing your full res image against a 1200 pixel image prove anyway? If you feel Flickr is altering your 1200 pixel images, then what you need to do it link to the original 1200 pixel version you feel is better via dropbox or something.
 
I've done my own tests comparing the original file uploaded to Flickr and the one served back by Flickr.

Lay one over the other in Photoshop, set the layer mode to Difference and you get a black screen. There is no difference between the two.
 
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