High-Resolution Images in Marketplace Listings
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RestrainedRaptor Resident
Marketplace images are limited to 700x525 pixels. This really needs to be increased so we can actually see what we're buying.
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Juniper Linden
Merged in a post:
Replace gif with webm, or allow youtube/vimeo/sketchfab/etc videos as previews
Chaser Zaks
Currently, creators can upload gifs to their marketplace listings (Limit 1 I think?).
GIFs are heavy, even if they are low quality and low frame rate. That's three cons: Low frame rate, low quality, and heavy bandwidth wise.
Many sites, including Tenor, Giphy, Reddit, and Discord, convert to gifs to webm when possible. However, they also allow uploading of webms now.
The benefit is the low size of webms while retaining relatively good quality and frame rate.
This will allow creators to better demonstrate their objects, especially animated objects, animations, or otherwise show case special features of a product with extended play time, quality, and resolution, while still maintaining a less than 1 megabyte upload limit.
The server can use ffmpeg to sanitize webm uploads (I.E. remove audio, constrain resolution, etc), as many other sites do.
The upload limit could be addressed separately.
Alternatively, allowing linking of youtube, vimeo, sketchfab, etc as a preview. This offloads the need to host the video, though this means the video can disappear at any time.
I feel that this is important, as gifs are a underutilized feature on the marketplace, which I feel is in part due to the low quality of them, and the fact it doesn't do the product it is advertising justice.
J
Juniper Linden
Merged in a post:
Use AVIF or WebP Images
Extrude Ragu
Currently the MP is storing/serving product images as JPEG.
I propose switching Marketplace images such that all new uploads are converted to AVIF. In general this typically results in image file sizes being 3/10ths of JPEG equivalents, with no noticeable loss in quality.
MP Images are currently quite low resolution for modern UHD monitors. We could use the saved space to afford creators higher resolution images that are more suitable for the new modern MP.
Lucky Clover
As long as we can still Upload the gifs and they're just converted server-side, as people are used to making gifs more and most don't even know how webms are made, yes!
Webm is a great format and it's supported by all browsers these days as far as I know, and would give us the bonus of, as far as users are concerned, just gifs that don't autoplay and can be paused. WebP is a direct gif replacement, but WebM would allow the option of audio as well.
You already can't set a gif as the main thumbnail, iirc gifs are even something you have to click on manually? so that wouldn't be a concern.
This would allow for better quality over gifs, smaller filesizes, and I'd assume any audio from a user-made webm file would be muted by default, but would then allow for people to essentially put entire (very quick) guides on the listings, if the filesize is small enough. I made a guide for a product that's less than 2 minutes long, could probably be pretty small in that format, but had to make a youtube account just for one video that way. I'd absolutely love the ability to just have it in the listings themselves if short and small enough!
Zia Underwood
please no webm
Peter Stindberg
Feels as if that has been suggested before, but makes total sense.
Just... please no animation on the main pic of an item. Imagine a page full of 96 moving thumbnails.
Chanticleer Evergarden
Yes, and the ability to zoom closer. I can barely see written details on the photos on the marketplace and it is very frustrating.
Gwyneth Llewelyn
- Not to mention that Mac/iPhone users, as well as Windows users with HiDPI displays, will alwayssee the images blurred.
- If the issue is disk space (since LL will need to carry the cost for the additional sizes for millions of products), allow external links, on Flickr for example, to be shown in the lightbox when zooming in. The MP would only hold the "thumbnails" like before.
- Consider allowing the upload of different formats.There is really zero reason for restricting users to one or two formats which were obsolete even by 2004 standards — just because "everybody" used them. WebP is the _de facto_ standard these days, thanks to Google supporting it directly on Chromium, even if it's a bit worse than HEIF/HEIC (mostly used by Apple). Or go straight to support AVIF — according to Wikipedia, in 2020, 93% of all browsers supported it natively (AVIF was designed to supersede WebP!).
This would allow huge images, sometimes with lossless compression, stored at smaller sizes than PNG and often even smaller than JPEG.
Oh, and these modern formats can also easily store compressed video and/or animations. You could simply restrict the upload to a specific filesize which would give astonishing results for still images, but for those who'd really like to show the item being used (such as, say, an animation overrider or a dance) could opt for a highly-compressed video instead. All these modern formats are capable of that.
Gwyneth Llewelyn
That said, why do people still use the obsolete JPEG, PNG, or, the worse of them all, GIF?! Well, the reason is simple: these formats were designed at a ime when compressing and decompressing were very expensive operations. Those file formats had therefore to juggle with different limitations: they had to deal with as much information they could (to allow large, beautifully coloured images), make the creation of such images not take way too long (nobody is willing to wait an hour just to get an image compressed to insanely small sizes...), make them as small as possible (to deal with the litle available bandwidth), and, most importantly, decompressing or decoding the image should happen almost instantly.
But that was true for 1985, when GIF became popular, and a 1 MHz CPU was considered "acceptable".
40 years later, we stream 4K video at 30+ FPS on our modestly-powered Raspberry Pis — but are still stuck to JPEG and GIF for still images! That borders on insanity...
So... if the issue is how much more extra disk space will be consumed... the answer is: change to a
contemporary
file format! Very likely, you will even use less
disk space overall, if everything is re-encoded into a modern format.Oh, and a small tip. If moving to a contemporary format is out of the question for some reason, well, all you need is to have an enterprise subscription to TinyPNG — which, in spite of the name, works with JPEG and WebP, too. A PNG as saved by the SL Viewer's snapshot feature can easily be compressed by TinyPNG to a WebP which is 30x smaller. That's not 30% smaller; it's 30 _times_. The quality remains the same. That's how good WebP is (or how bad PNG is...), but it requires TinyPNG's ultra-sophisticated algorithms to do that (believe me, I've tried to do the same with other free & open-source tools, and they cannot come even close to the magic that TinyPNG does). So, when someone uploads an image in JPEG, PNG, or WebP format, it would get fed to the TinyPNG API, which would compress them to whatever format is smaller (
usually
that will be WebP for lossless images, although JPEG might beat WebP occasionally, for lossy images). You, Linden Lab, don't need to worry — you'll just get the smallest possible size imaginable, and that's what you store on your disks. Users would get to see their favourite items in glorious 24-bit 4K, which would take the same time to download and to display
than old, 700x525 JPEGs...Without Ordinary
Support for 360 snapshots would be cool.
Spidey Linden
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Issue tracked. We have no estimate when it may be implemented. Please see future updates here.
Blau Rascon
This would be very appreciated especially given a lot of folks like to do these very fancy detailed photoshoot style product images and then not offer easier-to-see detail shots of the thing.
700x525 is tiny by today's standards. I'm pretty sure I had forum signatures bigger than that back in the day. Increasing the allowed image size, showing the full size on click, maybe with a hover-zoom function would be handy.
And yeah a filesize limit alongside the increased image pixel-size to keep people from uploading overly-heavy images would be needed, mostly for PNGs though, JPG tend to be much smaller. (Or allow WEBP image upload, those are itty bitty but have high quality)
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