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← darkroom
Cover image resolution
I believe cover image resolution should be increased as some posters are blurry especially when opened in full screen, even when using the extra large variant of the image. I know this would probably increase the website upkeep cost, but I feel it’s worth it given the website’s scale now.
Edit:
Upon further digging I noticed that the website saves very small cover images in resolution for very high cost in storage, to show the issue I attached links to the cover image of Re:Zero season 3.
Original image poster image (1.03MB in size) (2876x4096px)
Largest Anilist image (434 KB in size) (460x655px)
50% downcaled original image (407 KB) (1438x2048px)
The downscaled image is way higher in resolution while having pretty much the same file size as the best available cover image on Anilist.
There isn’t really a point in increasing the resolution… we’re not an image database. The 650px width limit is more than enough for our use of reference.
not sure what you mean “blurry”, images usually aren’t blurry when viewed in their native resolution since we downscale from high-resolution sources (unless you have the page zoomed in from your browser or it is from a low-quality source like many old shows).
If it’s from a low quality cover and you can find a higher resolution, you can use our submission system to replace it.
(not to mention legality I think, thumbnails could probably be excused as fair use… but having full-resolution images could be taken down for copyright or something.)
The images aren’t particularly blurry when viewed using the current UI but most cover images are blurry when you zoom in or open the image in a new tab, however, you can immediately notice the difference in quality when looking at cover images when posted on twitter on the website twitter account and when opening the page on the website.
I get that the website is not intended as an image database but I feel like cover images provide information on their own as well. I feel like the bare minimum should be adding the url of the original image to the database to provide users with the full quality image.As for the legality of using full resolution images, if it counts as copyright infringement, then just having the full resolution image url should suffice.
I just thought it would improve the website’s user experience as I’ve always noticed this issue.
Are you by any chance using chrome (or another chromium based browser) and if so can you check with firefox to see if you have the same issue.
I use Anilist on different browsers, devices, and apps it’s not a browser specific issue, I just feel like image quality could use an upgrade.
I know what he means by blurry.
The AL settings recommend uploading a banner with the size of (1700x330px). ~
Meanwhile, the most common resolution for people browsing in PCs is 1920px in width.
Anilist applies the "cover" css property to the banner section, which means the image will be resized to cover the whole banner space, while maintaining the original aspect ratio. All using your browser's "instant resizing" algorithms which are far from ideal for quality.But wait, so that means if you upload a 1920x330 image, your image will cover the expected 1920 pixels most users have and problem will be solved right? Well, no.
Every profile has a scrollbar. In anilist's case it varies according the user's settings for sizes (people with bigger things will see things bigger), the correct thing to do. In my browser's settings (default sizes in Firefox), it takes 8 pixels in length, which is what it should look like to most people. So that means that the space the banner will actually be resized to is 1912px.
Oh, so that means I can skip the resizing if I just do a 1912x330 image!
...is what you innocently thought right now.But life isn't that pretty.
If you hopefully upload an image that's over 1900px in width, Anilist will just resize it to 1900px.
AND THEN WHEN PRESENTING IT ON A DESKTOP IT WILL RESIZE AGAIN TO 1912PX.Here's an example for the loss in quality:
To fix this, anilist doesn't need to increase the server's scaling. It simply needs to allow for more 12px of width. That just means 12x330=3.960 more pixels per banner, which translates to 0.00377655 MegaBytes.
...........
Wait, never mind, I re-read the topic and it seems you're talking about show covers, not user covers. Idk if they're treated the same way so I'll just leave it. (also, I feel the need to leave this rant out in the open)
The issue your describing is entirely different from what I meant; I just think that the resolution for cover/poster images needs a bump up.
As an example you can take a look at this poster image (1.03MB in size) of Re:Zero season 3 cover image posted on Anilist's twitter account vs this image (434 KB in size) which is on the Anilist website. The resolution is so far apart for double the size, I even tried to downscale the original full sized image by 50% which resulted in a slightly smaller image in size with way higher resolution. It seems to me that the resolution of the cover images can be improved without increasing the storage requirements just by improving the algorithms used to downscale the images on upload.