Anybody know why Blogger is auto-compressing my JPGs?

[Doppel]

I've tried googling this but the nature of the question is just giving bad hits.

I have a header on a blogger (blogspot) site. It's a JPG that looks nice, is 51k in size. After uploading, blogger is automatically compressing it down to 30k. As a result the image is looking bad from excessive compression and the colors are going to hell (orange turning to yellow, for example).

If I upload the image as a PNG, blogger can't do jack to it and it looks good, but now is nearly 300k.

 

[lxskllr]

Probably to save bandwidth. Try compressing the png before uploading. See if you can get a good balance of size/quality. Alternately, use third party hosting, but that could introduce latency.

 

[Doppel]

Probably to save bandwidth. Try compressing the png before uploading. See if you can get a good balance of size/quality. Alternately, use third party hosting, but that could introduce latency.

I maxed the PNG compression on gimp, but with its losslessness it just won't go below 290k. I had some success with a gif but still not perfect.

Hosting myself with wordpress would be ideal, but this is new and I want to see if it gains any traction before spending cash (other than domain already purchased).

 

[Mushkins]

lsx is right. Blogspot is automatically compressing JPGs that are uploaded to save on their own server space costs. They do it to JPGs because they can, where they can't compress a lossless format like PNG any more than you can. The irony being that you dont like the compression artifacts and your only option to solve it is to replace it with a file 6x the size of the original uncompressed JPG.

It's their software and their servers, they can compress whatever they please on them and you dont really have any way to stop them other than using a different format or taking your business elsewhere.

 

[Doppel]

Yeah that is the silly thing I will just have to go with a massive file. It looks like I can optimize for web though and shrink the file more by dumping some colors out of the png.

Thanks for ideas!

 

[Doppel]

If anybody ever cares to read this: Header image compression at blogger is terrible.

I managed to take my header and shrink it to a pretty decent-looking 19k. Uploaded it and Blogger automatically re-compressed it--increasing its size to 22-25KB AND making it look awful.

I noticed, however, that the header widget allows URL linking of an image. So, I created a new post, uploaded my header image to it, and noticed that although Blogger had altered the image size once more, its quality was the same (to my eye). I then copied its URL and used that as my header image URL, and it looks good.

I therefore conclude, at least for my header image, that I need to either upload as a 200k+ PNG, which cannot be compressed, or upload as a JPG elsewhere on the site (or some other image hosting solution) and just link to that instead.