Thinking about images on the internet

I've seen a lot of people complain about Pillowfort not allowing image uploads of larger sizes.

I'm not on Pillowfort, but I did help a friend reduce some image file sizes to upload to a different website. And you know, the funny thing is... a color-indexed PNG is much smaller than its full-color version, even when they have the exact same number of colors. And there's images where there will be colors missing, but it's surprisingly difficult to notice. Reducing the file size of scanned images of traditional artwork works better with color indexing than I ever thought it would.

And pixel art? I'm now realizing that saving them in full color is absolutely nothing but a waste of file size. They don't gain much of anything from being saved in RGB.

Like... the Stardew Valley screenshot I shared in this old post? It's color-indexed. It's a little under 20 KB. Neat, right?

Here's a piece of digital artwork I found online. The original artist, judging from the watermark, is ArcadianPhoenix. When I tried to hunt down the source upload, I found that ArcadianPhoenix long ago deleted their entire Deviantart presence - unsourced re-uploads are the only way this image survives.

The image is 900 pixels long and 696 pixels tall. It is a png, and examining it in GIMP finds it to be color-indexed.

Its file size is 132 KB, or more specifically 136,038 bytes.

I can tell this image isn't true pixel art, but rather a digital painting with airbrushed shading that got converted into a dithered, color-indexed image in post. Yet I don't think it hurts the image that much here? The color banding is most obtrusive on the ground the dragon is standing on, and the dithering elsewhere in the image lends it an interesting texture.

I've been thinking a lot about how people have gotten habitually sloppy about avoiding bloat, in both designing offline applications and designing websites. Modern websites run like garbage if you have weak or slow internet, while a website last updated in 2010.. well, it won't necessarily look great on a phone, but at least it'll finish loading in a timely manner. I'm thinking a lot about how cleaner, lower-byte web design is an art that needs to be understood and appreciated by the "slow web" movement, as well as embraced by the mainstream. And the high "weight" of images, video, and audio (and the devaluing of ways to reduce their "weight") is just one part of that issue.

Suggested Further Reading:

• I’m more proud of these 128 kilobytes than anything I’ve built since, by Mike Hall
• How web bloat impacts users with slow devices, by Dan Luu