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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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)
Dana Enyo
Seems like that's bigger than what I see on Amazon. And over there I'm spending serious cash.
RestrainedRaptor Resident
Dana Enyo I'm pretty sure most product images on Amazon are larger than 700 pixels wide. Ultimately it's the seller's responsibility to upload good, high-res photos of their products, and the webpage will let you zoom and pan around.
Dana Enyo
RestrainedRaptor Resident Absolutely not always. I chose a recent search at random (a dress) and the images are all 548 pixels wide. So it's not universal by any means.
RestrainedRaptor Resident
Dana Enyo Indeed, I did say 'most'. And any sellers uploading images that small should really be trying harder. I'd consider such low-res product images to be a red flag (possibly stolen images from another website).
Kadah Coba
Its 2014, 1080p has become standard, we got plenty of screen space now.
RestrainedRaptor Resident
Kadah Coba I know that was a typo, but yes, even in 2014, 1080p was the norm! 😁
Kadah Coba
RestrainedRaptor Resident More of an accurate joke for how late this is.