Blurry cover images

Hi.

I've noticed (the past couple weeks or so? can't recall how long...) that the cover images have been much more blurry than they previously were. Not only with other users' uploads which I remember as being sharper in appearance, but also ones that I uploaded myself, which I know were sharper previously.

I've posted comments about this issue in a couple of other threads...

message #54 in this thread:

http://www.librarything.com/talktopic.php?topic=35369

message #11 in this thread:

http://www.librarything.com/talktopic.php?topic=16317

...but I think no one is seeing them because they're older threads. So, now I'm posting this as a new thread.

For example, look at this cover:

http://www.librarything.com/work/1889760/book/20568382

Or this one:

http://www.librarything.com/work/99378/book/20566398

Or this one:

http://www.librarything.com/work/19228/book/31625845

And here's an example of a smaller book, which shows up very pixelated in my book list, due to the shape of the book (and its size gets expanded so its height is the same as other books' height):

http://www.librarything.com/work/3869619/book/20830827

Why are all of these so blurry?

Thanks,
John

P.S. Not to belabor the point, but I just came across this one. Check out the quality of THIS cover image:

http://www.librarything.com/work/614421/book/31626287

Surely this is not how these covers were intended to display??

Thanks again,
John

UPDATE: June 7th: I've since re-uploaded a new image for this book.

Fundamentally, we are showing larger covers now. Many of the member images we received were either not saved at higher resolutions or were not uploaded at higher resolutions.

I'm not sure how to solve this. We can make all the covers small again. They won't be better quality, and we'll miss out on improvements on those covers that ARE available at better quality.

And nothing is ever going to stop somebody from uploading a 15x15 pixel image (or, similarly, an image saved at 1% JPG quality) for one of a book's covers.

Um. Just don't resize the really small ones? The threshold is debatable, but that would fix the problem.

Well, but then people are going to complain that their covers look so nice and neat and the same size in their library, except for X, Y, Z and why can't we make them the same size as the others....

Which is why I also mentioned the 1% quality. There are going to be some things that are out of our control when dealing with member-contributed data.

The idea of not resizing it may be a good one, but it opens up other problems around the site with formatting, etc. I hazard a guess that we'd have more people upset about formatting that we do about a fuzzy cover. But maybe I'm wrong there. I live in my own world.

The long-term answer is more covers...

Hmm, guess I'm confused by Tim's statement "Fundamentally, we are showing larger covers now." Where are you showing larger covers? They look the same size to me as they've always been. (???)

The only difference I've noticed is that the occasional cover selected from Amazon (which used to display slightly larger than member-uploaded covers) now all seem to be the same size. Is this what you mean? I had assumed the Amazon images got SMALLER to match the user-uploaded covers.

(In fact, in the past, whenever I noticed that one of my book-entries had the slightly larger Amazon image, I always scanned my own copy & uploaded it because I didn't like the covers appearing as different sizes in my book list). Thus, when I look at my book list now (cover view), they all look the same as they always have to me. (Am I missing something here?)

Also, > 4:
But this doesn't explain the covers I've uploaded MYSELF, which used to appear sharper on LT, and are now blurry. (Not quite as blurry as some of the other ones I've seen from other users, such in my example-links above, but still blurrier than they used to appear).

After all, when I scan & view them on my computer before uploading, they are sharp, even when filling half my computer screen. And before whatever change has recently happened, they looked fine after I uploaded them to LT as well. Why should they become blurry now, especially since they're being displayed only in "thumbnail" size, while they were quite sharp when filling half my computer screen?

One other point I wanted to make is: I have spent a LOT of time in uploading covers for each and every one of my books which did not have a suitable (i.e. sharp) cover image already available. It's incredibly frustrating to go back now and see so many of my own uploaded images now appear blurry, after all the work I did to get them uploaded nicely in the first place.

Thanks,
John

Hi John,

The increase in cover size happened in April. Details were posted on the blog (Covers: Better, Bigger, Blanks, Defaults and Statistics) and in the "New Features" post you linked earlier. The problem you're describing was mentioned and explained in both of those posts.

To summarise, if you resize an image to be larger than the source image then the resulting image looks pixelated and blurry. The bigger the difference between the two sizes, the worse the result will be.

The problem surfaces in two cases. First, if a user uploads a small cover image (thumbnail sized, for example), then this will look bad if we make it larger (to match the size of the other covers).

Secondly, if a user uploaded an image prior to about October 2007, we resized the image and threw away the original. We did not ever claim that we were keeping the originals, and we also clearly stated that the image would be resized on the upload page - unfortunately many people did not notice this and have been surprised to find that we don't have the originals of images uploaded before that time.

All images uploaded since October have been kept in their original form. This includes some images which are several times larger than anyone's monitor.

Here are the blurry covers you linked to:

  

Those were uploaded in June & November 2006, and August 2007 respectively. Unfortunately we don't have the original files - we have a thumbnail version which is roughly 90x142 pixels.

Let's compare those with some covers you uploaded after October 2007:

  

These look pretty nice to me. They were created by resizing from the originals, which we have kept. For example, the cover for How the Grinch Stole Christmas is 1548x2200 pixels, and a very sharp high-quality scan. I can tell you that one of the small holes in the cover is on the inside corner of the L in "stole". ;)

Several users have reported instances in which a high-quality cover looks blurry when resized, and I'm looking into these. We haven't made any changes to the way we resize the images, but I suspect that using larger cover sizes has made flaws that were always there more apparent. On my TODO list is to find a reasonable compromise between processing time and quality, and improve the method used to create the resized versions of covers. However, I believe these problems are pretty rare - almost all of the complaints about the quality of a cover image are due to having a small image to resize from.

I hope this explains the problem in a bit more detail. I am genuinely sorry for all the effort you and other users have put in uploading high-quality covers prior to October 2007 - my only hope is that you kept the originals yourself, and are willing to re-upload them.

If you (or anybody else) have a problem with a resized cover image which was created from a high-quality scan you uploaded after the beginning of October 2007, then I do want to know about it! I will add any such image to my list of "problem covers", which will be useful when I get a chance to look at a better method of resizing them.

> 11

Thanks, felius.

I most definitely appreciate the time you took in composing that response. And now I completely understand.

I had tried to read through some of the earlier posts in other threads when I was initially trying to find out if this problem had been addressed before. And although some of what you've mentioned above is vaguely familiar from those other posts/blogs, for whatever reason it wasn't clear to me at the time and I didn't make the connection to the issue I was experiencing. Now (thanks to your detailed post above) it all makes sense.

(It's ironic that due to my having opted against the prior larger Amazon images and scanning my own versions {thus making the images in my cover view all the same height} that I never even realized that ALL of the cover images were now larger. I'd just assumed the various Amazon covers had gotten smaller. Thus, the whole enhancement of making all the cover images larger was completely lost on me. I guess the increase in size was so slight that my eye never noticed it--other than noticing the increased blurriness of the images in question).

Fortunately, I've saved all the images that I've scanned and uploaded to LT. While I'm somewhat bummed that I'll have to go back and re-upload the earlier ones (especially when I still haven't even finished getting all my books added to LT in the first place), I understand "what's done is done" in terms of the pre-Oct-2007 images, and I can appreciate that this issue is the result of you guys trying to make the site better overall for everyone.

Again, thank you very much for taking the time to clarify the issue for me (and for others who might be as confused as I).

Cheers,
John

This has been a long-standing problem with me (well, ever since the cover-resizing change) and I've spoken to nearly every staff member about it at some point.

And yes, some of the covers, like the top 3 in message 11, are blurry because of no saved originals. But some of my covers, that DO have big originals and were uploaded after that time when they started saving originals, are still blurry. Most noticably, many of my BabySitters Club books. I have been told by felius that my problem has not been forgotten (which I hope means it's being worked on).

Your baby sitters club books are exactly the problem I was talking about in the third-last paragraph of my post. They are on the list of "problem covers" (mentioned in the last paragraph). I can make a much nicer version, but it takes 15 seconds to do it.

That's not acceptable, because if you hit the "change cover" page (for example), and the covers aren't cached, and there are 20 of them shown, and they each take 15 seconds to generate.. well. Just imagine that 20 people are doing this simultaneously on 20 different pages.

Right now most of the covers look fine. I want them *all* to look fine, and we'll get there. Not today though, I'm sorry to report.

What about making that nicer version once and caching it for the problem covers?

>17 infiniteletters: I've actually considered that solution, but it doesn't really fix the problem for a few reasons:

a) It only fixes the covers I *know* about, which is likely to be a small subset of whichever covers are having problems.

b) I'd probably have to write a script to do it anyway, in order to get at the information I need to put it in the cache. This is time spent working on something which should probably have been spent working on the fix.

c) The cache is pruned periodically, and if the problem covers get pruned they'd have to be regenerated again. Handling this (and dealing with covers which were regenerated automatically/poorly before I made "pretty" versions) adds to the wasted work in b)

So, a good and tempting idea which is unfortunately more appealing in theory than in practice!

felius, thank you so much for working so much on this. I have no idea what goes into the whole resizing process, but I love that you explain it and help us understand (one of my many loves about LT), and it makes me even more patient to be kept up to date. Thank you.

18: I have lots of those theories, if you need any more. ;) Some of them even work! *gasp*

>20 infiniteletters: You can never have too many theories, bring them on ;) (well, you can have too many theories if you never make time to put any of them into practice, perhaps..)

Oh, and I found a way to generate clearer versions of my two "worst" candidates in less than a fifth of a second - much better! It's quite different to the way we generate them at the moment though, so I'll need to do a bit of testing before anything goes live. Just wanted to let you know there's progress.

(Yes, one of them is a Baby Sitter's Club book..)

21> Okay little theory: Might it be that covers that are blurry while they shouldn't have a horizontal or vertical resolution that is *not* a multiple of 16 pixels?

That's an interesting theory. Shouldn't take long to test! I'll have a look tomorrow, I think.

cool -- how's the new algorithm at handling black on red / red on black?

http://www.librarything.com/work/1396191/details/31131415
http://www.librarything.com/work/840251/details/29933272
http://www.librarything.com/work/3674192/details/31803343

(I have better examples in my library, but the covers were uploaded at small sizes -- these three covers above are the only black&reds that I have uploaded at a larger size (at least 600 pixels tall). I'll have to upload some others to check things out once you push the change).

Mozart: The Golden Years is the other of my "two worst covers" ;)

Preliminary tests - I've been looking at them too long and can't decided what I think anymore. What do you think?

First, "problem" covers:

 
 

Covers that I thought looked fine as they were:

 
 

Hmm. Perhaps it's more widespread than I thought.

Ohhhhh yeah there is definitely a difference! I think you found it, felius!! (whatever "it" is)

Mozart made the greatest improvement (from practically unusable to quite nice) but all of them are noticeably improved. The two bottom ones were OK before but they're better now - much sharper (and truer colors, I think - especially on the words for the Grinch). I probably wouldn't have noticed the difference if I didn't have the two of them sitting right next to each other, for the lower two, though.

What is the change, John?

Way to go, felius!
The examples look great.
Thanks, guys, for your efforts!
John

John, is the change now live? Did you clear all the old ones?

Hi, Tim.
I'm not sure what you mean by "the change."
Do you mean, have I re-uploaded all of my images that I scanned and uploaded prior to October 2007? If so, the answer is no. I was planning to concentrate on getting finished with adding all my books to LT first. After that, I plan to go back and check the quality of all of the cover images. Or am I misunderstanding something? Thanks. John

>31 SpacemanSpiff: I'm pretty sure Tim was asking the question of John Dalton (aka felius), who is a member of the LT staff...

>32 SilentInAWay:

Right. Sorry. Didn't know you were a John too. Felius would be "John," but employees who became employees after being LT member don't have to use their real name :)

> 28,30

The change isn't live yet - I haven't changed the image generation code at all, in fact. I generated those thumbnails using ImageMagick instead of libgd, though it won't be too hard to alter the code.

Once I've done that and tested it I think I'll expire the old ones gradually over the course of a few days, rather than have us have to regenerate them all in one hit.

> 32 & 34
Cool.
Thanks again.
(the other) John

35: So, has the change gone live yet? What is the status on this?

Also, I uploaded a cover about a week or so ago, and then had no internet, so I'm just now realizing this: My uploaded cover for Stickeen is very blurry, it is especially noticable around the title of the book. Once again, the image was big and clear when I uploaded it.
http://www.librarything.com/work/217226/31890025

Guess I shouldn't upload any more covers until this is fixed, huh? Duh. Just uploaded this one, came out blurry:
http://www.librarything.com/work/book/32729010

I know you all are probably busy with all the new homepage stuff, but any way I can just get an update on where things are with this?

I'd be interested in an update on this too, the improved ones in Message 25 all look so much better.

Sorry, it's waiting on me and I've been busy just keeping things running due to a few server issues. I'll try to take a look at it soon - the change is pretty straightforward, it's just the testing to track down unintended side effects that always takes up the most time!

*resists hugging felius like a crazy fan*

THANK YOU for an update! Glad to know it hasn't slipped off the radar, at least!

*bumps hopefully*

Any progress?

My stack of BSC cover-images are waiting to be uploaded. lol

I came across a blurry image today. Orbitsville has a blurry cover (especially noticeable in the Orbitsville Series).

P.S. When you click on "see all 7 covers" you are shown eight member covers plus one Amazon cover making nine in all.

*bump again!*

Please? status? anything?

FWIW, in the August 7 blog post, Tim said: "Some covers are blurrier than we'd like, particularly at the "large" size. This is sometimes about original files and sometimes about our resizing routines. We're working on the latter." (emphasis mine)

I imagine that you're looking for something a bit more specific, but I thought I'd mention it in case you hadn't seen the blog.

45: I saw that, but it's very very vague.

I'm not usually one to harp on getting bugs fixed before pushing new features, but will all this recent Collections talk, it's really starting to frustrate me that this is still a bug and I can't get a solid response about it. I have completely stopped uploading covers because too many turn out blurry. This needs to be fixed!

>46 Heather19:

We keep the originals.

I know you're very hot on this, but it's not as important as something like collections. We have to prioritize, and this can't be on the top.

In fact, this is waiting on John to get some free time, as he has done all the work here. He's at a conference this week.

There is no reason not to upload new covers. We keep originals now, so when I get time to change the resizing code (I did the example images above by hand, and the method is quite different to the existing code) then I will regenerate all existing covers. (actually, I'll just aggressively prune the cache over a period of several days, forcing them to be regenerated automatically as they're requested.)

I want pretty covers too! Also, spines! Maybe in my 20% time ;)

^ felius, does this mean that I will still have to re-upload the dozens (perhaps hundreds) of covers I scanned previously? I'm guessing so since you say "we keep originals now", as opposed to having kept them all along. And if so, can I start doing that now with confidence?

Not trying to criticize, just making double/triple sure I understand. Thanks for all your work!

Tim, please take your vacation time or you're going to go insane! ;-)

49: Check post 11 up above.

47: Oh I know this can't be a top priority, and I totally understand that. I just wanted to know it hadn't fallen off the radar, that's all.

48: Holy cow. That means I could've been freely uploading covers all this time? Well dang! I guess I misunderstood it. Well yay!

....... Just to make sure.... even the Babysitters Club ones? (I know you were having troubles resizing those)

51: As far as I understand it, you can upload covers whenever and they will be kept. The problem is with the particular method they use to shrink the covers for display. Since the original covers are kept, they can improve the display method with no impact to those originals.