I'm interested in knowing about this too. It seems that everything is being compressed. My image uploads are being compressed to a 68% JPEG compression level/quality with a 4:2:0 chroma sub-sampling method on TMDB. So I tried matching that, but it still reprocessed the image which, of course, introduced more artifacts.

The strange thing is, I accidentally uploaded a png episode image for a new series/currently airing, and it was accepted, converted to jpg and looked really good. But that's the exception, I tried uploading png elsewhere and it's not being accepted. Edit: I realize now that these were just jpegs with a png extension.

I doubt that someone ever admits that. So apparently it is okay to store thousands of deleted images, but not okay to spare more space for the sake of quality.

All I could find on this issue is this thread from 5 years ago, so I don't know if this is still up to date: https://www.themoviedb.org/talk/5ae53f1dc3a3687d2800036a

But I did a test just now and I did notice that there's a lot of blocky artifacts being introduced on a drawn poster that I uploaded (2000x3000), especially around text.
Short comparison video, original was exported with 95% quality (1.98 MB) vs. the result (560 KB): https://we.tl/t-tJZ4ScvAfH

I understand the bandwidth concern, but maybe compression algorithms were improved over the past 5 years, so the image service needs an update.

https://i.postimg.cc/T1H1X8Dx/Screenshot-2023-04-18-at-09-37-38.png

I won't be surprised if someone decides it is too blurry to keep.

Has compression become more aggressive lately? So many images end up deleted due to the compression introduced by your site, because some mods are quite aggressive about that. It begs the question, what is the point of wasting the time on finding, cropping and uploading decent images if they are turned to crap by your system and get deleted.

@shotfirer said:

Has compression become more aggressive lately? So many images end up deleted due to the compression introduced by your site, because some mods are quite aggressive about that. It begs the question, what is the point of wasting the time on finding, cropping and uploading decent images if they are turned to crap by your system and get deleted.

I thought a mod said before in a previous thread aswell that some images end up being more heavily compressed than others. I should've asked them to elaborate on why/which images it happens to.

And to me I do notice that some of my uploads look more or less unchanged after uploading while some look significantly worse

@softpillow said: And to me I do notice that some of my uploads look more or less unchanged after uploading while some look significantly worse

Yes, and it seems that this balance lately has been shifted to the worse side. Or someone just has too much free time to specifically scrutinize my uploads. My "internal" quality meter has not changed, yet the uploaded images end up much worse than they should. Or treated with much more "attention to detail", I don't know.

It looks very catch-22 to me. You can't compress images like crazy and at the same time reject even slightly over-compressed images. It is incredibly annoying to find out that many of your uploads are being deleted because the on-site compression f.cks them up. I'd say either lower your expectations or reduce the default compression. Or implement a more advanced algorithm.

A few examples to illustrate.

original vs uploaded (and deleted)

original vs uploaded (and deleted)

100% crop original and uploaded (pixel soup, expecting to be deleted)