dA, stop ruining our images!

Update

Good news everyone! I just got confirmation that it’s a bug and being worked on. Thanks, spyed!

Original journal

The eagle-eyes among you might have noticed that something is going on with our deviations: They look somewhat worse than before. Why? DeviantArt is now compressing the full-view – and rather aggressively so! Previously, the full-view was exactly what you were uploading (unless you specifically told the upload process to scale it down). But now, the full-view gets re-saved as well. Worse, they're in the process of re-saving all (most? some?) of existing deviations across the site. (It seems, only JPEGs are affected, PNGs are fine.)

Here, let me demonstrate. Let's take this logo that i made last year:

The following picture is a zoomed-in crop of the full view – and it looks pretty bad, right? You can see it has strong JPG-artifacts all over it. This is what DeviantArt is doing to our pictures now! Move your mouse over it to see how it originally looked like:

(Note: I have saved these in PNG format to not degrade its quality further. Click here to save them.)

My original file was 140kB in size, the new save is 55kB. This is insane! You can clearly see a difference, right? The compressed version is what happens to all of our images now!

I get it, though, where they're coming from. This has been standard practice on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, etc. to save bandwidth and reduce loading times. Fair point. Plus, when you view a picture on a high-DPI screen (such as a Retina Display on a Mac, or pretty much any smartphone of the last 5 years) you won't really notice it as much. I also know that a graphic such as this looks worse than a photograph under a similar compression. Still, i have always seen DeviantArt as more than a "timewaster" where you casually scroll through an endless stream of stuff and soon forget about what you have seen. DeviantArt works differently: You ponder over one piece of art much longer! But you can't do that when an image looks so shitty. I've always taken dA seriously, and i expect them to treat our pictures accordingly. Display them as best as you can!

I don't want to start a panic or scream bloody murder, but i do want to point this out and bring it to your attention before it's too late and all the images have been converted.

Oh, and i almost forgot about the second part of this issue: Downloads. While images that you can download via the Download button (where said feature was enabled by the uploader) are indeed the originally uploaded files, the filename, however, is now more often than not garbled as hell. Previously a downloaded filename would read as follows: title_by_deviant_string.ext. Awesome! This way you could always see the title of a deviation as well as the artist. Helps a bit against art theft, too. Not a whole lot (it's very easy to rename a file, i know that), but every so often i find a hotlinked file somewhere on the net, and i can easily trace down the original artist. Plus it's very easy to track down what you have downloaded. It's convenient, you know? Now, the downloaded file often has a very long string of random numbers as its filename. Plus, every once in a while i come by a downloaded file that reads file.htm. Yes, a HTML file, when it's actually a JPEG. I'm sure this is a bug, but it has to be reported, too.

(I'm going to ping a few of you admins, so you see this – no spam intended: spyed makepictures Heidi danlev moonbeam13 aunjuli chris ArtBIT micahgoulart zilla774 dt)