Last modified: 2006-09-25 21:57:48 UTC
Compare http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/a/a5/Champions_League_trophy.jpg/375px-Champions_League_trophy.jpg with http://static.flickr.com/95/224894467_8f0e771cce.jpg Adding a small amount of sharpening when downscaling photos (this would probably be limited to jpegs) is a fairly standard practice. Are the processor costs high? I can't imagine it adds much to the time it takes to resize. I also imagine such tools are available in our image library (ImageMagick?).
This might be a daft question, but why not simply upload the much sharper image in the first place? Is it really necessary to upload huge images which are never going to be used at full resolution? One thought does occur: are those high-resolution versions in preparation for hard-copy publication?
Or for anything else that might come up. Shrinking images destroys information. If you keep a large copy somewhere handy, and you need a small copy for something, you can shrink it; if you only have the small copy and you need a large copy, you're screwed.
Duping to 6193; maybe reopen that and add some comments. I vaguely recall this being raised even earlier but can't find it at the moment. *** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of 6193 ***