Flickr decided to change the image compression system for all thumbnails without any prior announcement to its users, which led to nagging from the most observative.
The whole affair started when some users have complained to Flickr for a reduction in the quality of the photos they have uploaded.
This has led the PetaPixel blog that deals with photography in general, to make an in-depth exploring the whole situation, which yielded some interests Results.
First of all, some basics data: when you upload a photo to Flickr, the service, in addition to storing the original photo on its servers, also creates additional icons in varioussolutions.
The technical approach of PetaPixel was to take one of the previous photos that had been uploaded to Ficker a few years ago and to upload it again today, with Ficker's current parameters.
As a result, there was a lower quality for all icons, but the original photo was the same as the one they had previously uploaded.
The changes made to FIickr's algorithm seem to only affect thumbnails, sometimes reducing their file size by up to 50%, but that doesn't seem to bother too many of its users, as most of which they have not yet noticed change.
Original photos are stored individually and Ficker still offers 1TB free storage for all users.
Ficker's response to the PetaPixel survey was as follows:
FIickr does not compress the originals If you download your originals, the files you receive will be completely identical. Like most photo apps, we've created a variety of thumbnail sizes for quick reference presentation of images on the internet and on mobile phones.”
