About a week ago, this very server had some severe connectivity issues. As usual, not a problem on the server itself but bloody network mayhem: FTP and SSH were, long story short, unusable for data transfers. But I had just finished this post about OpenStreetMap and I wasn’t in the mood to delay it too much, so I though about an alternative method to “upload” the pictures it contained: upload the picture to PhotoBucket, then download it from the server (SSH was working fine enough to be able to use wget and move files around).
As usual, I thought a bit about the best way to pack the pictures, decided that the moderate JPG gain wasn’t worth the quality loss over PNG, then squished the PNGs as much as I possibly could, using OptiPNG and PNGOUT.
The second picture, as can now be seen here, was about 472 KiB in size, substantially down from about a whole MiB (slightly less actually) as originally created with Paint or GIMP (not really sure which one I used this time). But when I grabbed it from PhotoBucket… it had inflated back to 920 KiB, a whopping 95% increase! I don’t mind PhotoBucket trying to recompress my uploaded pictures, but if they fail to improve the compression (particularly when they fail that much) maybe they should keep the original…
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