Image hosting picture quality

[romulus22]

I've never really noticed before but after comparing a couple pictures side to side I noticed how much photobucket destroys the picture quality once uploaded. Is this normal with all picture hosting sites? I know it doesn't help I'm using my phone for a camera. But when I compare the picture in photo bucket it's dramatically worse.

[bxlt]

Are you still looking at it on the phone after its been uploaded to photobucket? Some carriers will greatly compress images to save bandwidth. Photobucket does compress so it will be less quality then the original but shouldn't be drastically different.

[romulus22]

I have the picture still in my photo library and can see many details and stuff that is too blurry to see once it has been posted on here. I went to photobucket and the detail is lost there too.

This is the picture I'm comparing. I can easily read "yokomo" on the engine case in my photo library. After I post it its too blurry to read.

[Coelacanth]

There's usually an option to auto-downsize uploaded pictures to image hosting sites, because even in this day and age of modern technology, far too many people still don't know how to resize their pictures when their digital cameras take uber-hi-res images that are 3 or 4 MB each. YouTube similarly re-compresses uploaded videos. The problem is, the user has no say in how their uploads are being compressed; what compression utility is being used, what compression ratio is applied, etc.

I resize any picture I intend to share online. I compress videos myself so that I get a good balance of quality versus filesize. But of course, the average Joe doesn't do this and he's at the mercy of the free sites to do as they see fit with his file uploads. :/

EDIT: I downloaded your original pic, and indeed, it's quite large at 1600 x 1200 resolution. A web-friendly resolution shouldn't really need to exceed 1024 x 768. Anything bigger will cause people viewing your images (on sites that allow large images) on laptops and tablets to have to scroll up/down & left/right to view the whole image.

Also, I couldn't see the "Yokomo" anywhere in the image, either original or the resized one.

[romulus22]

When I comes to computers I'm about as tech stupid as stupid gets. And I'm fine with that. I hate computers. That's why my phone is my only source of Internet. Was just curious if the other image hosting sites did the same thing.

Coelacanth, pm me your email and I can email you the original if you'd like to see what it originally looks like. I think once its downsized if you just resize the picture the quality is still lost.

[a01butal]

Is that really a Yokomo in your picture, I must be blind but it looks more like an RC10GT. Oh well.

[romulus22]

The engine is a Yokomo. The truck is a GT.

[a01butal]

[GoMachV]

[THEYTOOKMYTHUMB]

I use photobucket and haven't noticed the issue you're talking about at all on my phone or PC. I wonder if you have an account setting set in a different way or something?

[romulus22]

My phone just captures the picture in a very large image size. When the picture is compressed is when the quality is lost.

[THEYTOOKMYTHUMB]

Ok. I keep mine on the smallest setting which is about 2.4mp I believe. Maybe that's the difference.

[romulus22]

Here is the same image I zoomed in on, took a screen shot, then uploaded to photo bucket. If you were to zoom in on the engine in my original full picture the engine is not this clear at all. And this is still less clear than if I zoom in on the original.

Just would've been nice to post clear pictures for once.

[THEYTOOKMYTHUMB]

I think it would have to be a super high quality pic to stay clear under that kind of magnification. Maybe you can try another free photo hosting site and see if you get better results. I really don't know much about the settings on photobucket. I've just always used whatever their default settings are.

[romulus22]

I have too. I think it's going to happen with whatever site I use as long as the picture size my phone takes stays the same.