Hi rbr28,

There are several ways to add photos in Piwigo, I suppose you are using the upload form directly in your browser.

It would be interesting to see one of your full resolution (high definition as we call it on Piwigo) and what Piwigo created for the websize photo.

In release 2.1.x, Piwigo uses the GD library to resize photos. As you can see on screen Administration>Photos>Add>Settings, the websize quality is 95% by default on resize which should decrease only a little the overall quality of your photo (of course the quality is in the eyes of the one who looks). You can change this setting to 100 for example and make another test.

If you really have a bad result on resize, maybe it's because your photos are in "Adobe RGB" or "CMYK" color space.

Make another test with pLoader (Administration>Photos>Add>Piwigo Uploader), the resize is made on your computer with ImageMagick.

Setting GD image quality to 100% doesn't have any impact.  Resized photo quality is still poor.  I tried pLoader but can't get it working on Gentoo Linux.  Looks like a libpng issue but I can't figure out exactly what the problem is.

It's really strange how bad the GD conversion is even at 100% quality.  There are several things I could think of to explain the color change (like dropping an embedded color profile), but the difference in sharpness is very significant too.  All my photos are saved as sRGB, so it's not a color gamut issue, although I can definitely see how the color difference would suggest that.

I also tried exporting via Digikam 1.3.  That worked with the first photo I uploaded and now I haven't been able to get it to work again.  Looks like a photo uploads, and I get no errors, but there's no photo uploaded.

Is there any chance a toolkit choice (i.e. choose imagemagick, gd, netpbm, etc.) could be enabled for web upload, and some configuration options could be available for how the toolkit handles the resize?  I'm thinking ImageMagick and basic options for image quality, size, sharpening, etc.  Ideally I'd like the option to have absolutely nothing changed on my intermediate size image, other than the size.

Thanks,
Vern

rbr28 wrote:

Setting GD image quality to 100% doesn't have any impact.  Resized photo quality is still poor.

thats normal, if you do not sharpen after resizing.  i think this is the problem at resizing with gd lib, there are no sharpening after resizing.

a pwg_high with 85% quality, manualy  resized to a smaller pic and also reduced to 80% jpg quality with manually added sharpening (a normal workflow in the early days of phpwebgallery with ftp upload) look better than gd resized pictures with 95%.

(sorry for my ugly english)

Ploader definitely does a better job.

If ImageMagick is added as an option for web upload, wouldn't it be relatively easy to add the option to pass a couple parameters to it for the upload, for example the quality and level of sharpening?  Even being able to set this as a global default rather than for each upload would be more beneficial than having no user control.  I'd even be willing to do this by editing the parameters in a php file if necessary! 

The only problem I have with no control of this is that the degree of sharpening that works well varies depending on the type of picture.  A picture taken at a very high ISO, may look too noisy at a particular setting whereas a low ISO photo would be fine.

And hopefully just one final question on this subject, about manually resizing the web size image.  I'd be fine with doing that so I have the ultimate control over exactly how my web size image looks.  I'm not sure about the workflow to get that image posted and linked to the full size though.  Is that still possible in the current version of Piwigo?  I have full access to my web server so I have multiple ways to get both a high res image and a web size image put in the correct directories but I'm not sure what to do after that.  I remember seeing some documentation about ftp uploading so I'll go back and see if I can figure things out from that, but any tips would be appreciated.

Thanks for all the help.

Vern

I took some time to experiment with the ftp upload/synchronization method of getting files into Piwigo.  This actually works well for me, but first let me say thanks for the nice documentation within the application itself.  The diagram under directories and file organization really helped clarify for me how things worked. 

This option works well for me because it allows for complete control over the quality of the mid-size image and the file and directory names and structure used.  I use Digikam for my photo editing and since I can save my files on a network file system, it's easy to actually save the photos directly to my web server and not even have an extra transfer step.  I just have to go in and do the thumbnail generation and synchronization.  This is a nice fall-back option and I hope it never goes away, even with future enhancements to the web upload option.

I'd still like to see all the enhancements discussed here such as use of the ImageMagick toolkit for the web upload, with options customization, but the ftp upload will definitely work fine for me in the meantime.

One other suggestion I have for the web form is based on what I like about the ftp upload.  The images uploaded via the web get put in a somewhat odd directory structure, with new names (date based).  I'm guessing maybe this is necessary or desired because of Piwigo's support for multiple users, permissions, an approval process and so on.  In the case of a single user gallery such as mine, I'd prefer to have my files uploaded with the name I give them, in directories with names I've assigned.  This is the default behavior with the ftp upload method but the web upload renames directories and files based on date.  This makes it very difficult to find a specific picture among thousands, at the filesystem level.

Vern

rbr28 wrote:

I took some time to experiment with the ftp upload/synchronization method  [...] This is a nice fall-back option and I hope it never goes away

It won't. Piwigo has a 8 years history and pLoader was added for Piwigo 2.0 (2009) and web upload was added for Piwigo 2.1 (2010). It means that on the first 6 years, FTP+synchronization was the only was to add photos on your gallery. New methods are much easier for the beginner but FTP+sync is also very appreciated by advanced users. Having several methods to add photos is not a problem. The most important is that each user finds the best method for his/her own need.

rbr28 wrote:

One other suggestion I have for the web form is based on what I like about the ftp upload.  The images uploaded via the web get put in a somewhat odd directory structure, with new names (date based).  I'm guessing maybe this is necessary or desired because of Piwigo's support for multiple users, permissions, an approval process and so on.  In the case of a single user gallery such as mine, I'd prefer to have my files uploaded with the name I give them, in directories with names I've assigned.  This is the default behavior with the ftp upload method but the web upload renames directories and files based on date.  This makes it very difficult to find a specific picture among thousands, at the filesystem level.

I understand your concern and of course you're not the first to wonder why the new methods use an automatic directory tree to store photo files compared to the manual directory tree under the "galleries" directory (used by synchronization).

On important reason is "simplicity" for the user and for the developper (for me in this case). With the synchronization method you may have understood that there were many constraints on directory names and files names. With the web upload/pLoader-like, there is no constraint on the category name and on the file name, you can have your filename in chinese if you want.

Another reason is "privacy". On the filename, we have added a random string, that make it quite impossible for a visitor to guess your filename.jpg. With synchronization, you may have galleries/peter_wedding/img_0001.jpg, galleries/peter_wedding/img_0002.jpg, with web upload/pLoader-like, you will have 2010/07/15/20100715001603-802b65d8.jpg and 2010/07/15/20100715000427-1234abcd.jpg => we make the spy life a bit more complicated.

Yes, it makes your life difficult when it comes to find a specific picture at filesystem level only (if you can't read the database). For a specific photo, you can simply search the original filename in Piwigo and you will find your photo (but that means you have to ask Piwigo first, filesystem is not enough)