Last modified: 2006-05-10 23:34:26 UTC
The thumbnails are not crisp enough -- they are blured: this is a comparison of the thumbnails generated by wikimedia and flickr, both of them from the same image source: http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/2/2d/Graffiti-Bucharest.jpg/500px-Graffiti-Bucharest.jpg http://static.flickr.com/51/142888852_027a178d69.jpg?v=0
what software does flickr use for thumbnailing? MediaWiki generally is configured to use ImageMagick.
By amazing coincidence, the sharper version is also twice the file size, and thus twice the download time and twice the bandwidth cost.
Sorry, Brion, the size has little to do with sharpness in this case. I compressed the flickr image to have the same size as the wikimedia one: http://img223.imageshack.us/img223/5092/graf7lc.jpg
Your personal preference for artificially sharpened images is appreciated, but not particularly relevant.
Perhaps the could be a configuration setting for the thumbnailing method and quality used with ImageMagick. I don't think it needs to be changed for Wikimedia projects, though.
Daniel, it looks clearly like a sharpen filter to me. IMHO this tends to increase ugliness from artifacting, but perhaps there are some tradeoff improvements that could be made. I'll go ahead and reopen this if some better techniques can be suggested; note that a trickier thing is handling smooth areas of images properly. Particularly subject to ugly artifacts are areas such as deep blue skies and the edges of buildings against them. Sharpening an already JPEG'd image might make these areas worse, especially if quality has to be turned down to make up for the extra space required by higher frequency sharpened parts of the image.
