Uploading looses quality!?

[wwshack]

Is there an optimum file size to upload to the database?

A quick look at the last load of files that I uploaded, ranged from 500 to 1500 kb.

[Sam at MAN]

Aye i used to be on dial-up until last January, is a really bugger. Used to take about a minute for 15 pics to load up, if they wernt compressed could of been about 5 mins!

[Chris Kilroy]

Tim,

We do indeed apply compression to photos as they are uploaded, normally reducing the quality by 5-6% out of 100. If your photos are clean when they're uploaded, generally, this won't be at all noticeable unless you really look hard for it. If your photos, however, are already compressed, or suffer from grain/noise problems, this process will tend to 'bring out the flaws' more after uploading.

Our reasons for this compression are twofold:

1. We host more than 3/4 million photos, and disk space is a concern for us. The slight reduction in quality of JPEG images compared to the space savings (often times 250kb vs 750kb+ for each photo) is a no brainer.

2. While much of the western world has high speed internet available, many parts of the world still use primarily dialup for most of their internet work, and we want our site to be as friendly as possible for the estimated 60% of worldwide internet users who are still using dialup.

[meneses24]

When you upload shots, they get compressed. For example a 500kb picture may be compressed to 300+kb.

The effect can be also noted when you apply the watermark

[timb]

Just uploaded a shot, previewed it and the quality in many parts of the picture were like in GIF images with all the dots. This was nothing like it was before I uploaded it.

Whats happening?