The following is mainly for photographers, but anyone can comment if they wish. I've quoted the developer, as he worded it quite well (plus it saves time
)We would love to hear your feedback on the following:
What we're doing
I made a big change to our image processing servers today. For thumbnail images on the site that are 300 pixels wide or smaller, our servers will now use the original image instead of the watermarked/copyrighted photo when generating a thumbnail. For example, here is a thumbnail from the detailed search results page before and after:
You can see the black copyright bar and the watermark are no longer visible on the updated thumbnail (right). Please note that due to CDN caching it may take a few days for all thumbnails to update to the clean version site-wide.
Right now only thumbnails that are 300px wide or smaller will be "clean." So right now you'll mainly notice the change on detailed search results pages.
You'll then notice that the various "card" layouts on the site use a slightly larger thumbnail, and these are still "dirty." Please see here: https://www.airliners.net/search?display=card
Here is an example of the thumbnail that is used for the card layouts (with giant watermark): https://imgproc.airliners.net/photos/air ... 72b-15.jpg
Right now that card thumbnail is 600 x 400 pixels. I haven't removed the watermark/copyright from this size because I know photographers would not be okay with an image this size without watermark/copyright bar.
So what I'd like to do is dial down these thumbnails to the maximum size that photographers will be okay with when not having a watermark/copyright bar. Could you guys talk to some photographers and find out what the max dimensions are that they'd be okay with for a clean thumbnail? I think something around 400px might work and wouldn't impact quality too much. The card thumbnails get stretched out to larger widths depending on the size of display that is being used, so they need to stay a little larger than the thumbnails that are on the detailed search results pages. An alternative option is to leave the card thumbnails as they are, with watermarks and copyrights in place wherever these thumbnails are used, although that's not ideal.
By the way, another factor we can adjust is JPEG compression. Currently our thumbnails are not highly compressed, most coming in at around 85% - 95% JPEG compression, which are very high quality thumbnails. Reducing thumbnail compression down to 75% is something that can be done.
Why we're doing this
This has been a top priority issue on the spreadsheet for a while now and it was actually planned for late last year but got postponed as a result of moving servers during the change in ownership. It's really just an issue of aesthetics and on the old site thumbnails did not contain copyright bars and watermarks. If you look at the home page you can see the black lines at bottom of many of the thumbnails and it doesn't look good or professional.
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So to reiterate: what we're asking is what size thumbnail you'd be OK with if shown without watermark. As mentioned, we are able to scale the card thumbnails down to 400px, in combination with in increased JPEG compression (from ~90% down to 75%).
