Thinking about images on the internet

[malymin]

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

Comments

[wavesagainstrocks]

I've definitely tried my best to make my own stuff more accessible in recent years, but this is something that hadn't crossed my mind! Thanks for bringing this up!

[malymin]

NP! While I'm certainly not having to deal with the limitations of affordable internet in Nigera, my cushy first-world USA internet has given out on me enough (temporary outages, poor signal, just being laggy and slow, etc) that I'm given reason to think about how frustrating it is when an application requires web connectivity and has no offline equivalent, or the way infinite scroll on conventional socmed makes reading a comment section infinitely harder than reading the conversations on a BBCode forum or LJ/DW style platform, or how it takes a bajillion years for all the images on a tumblr page to load...

Or how. Um. All your games' strategy guides being on google docs (when you're not using any of the unique features of google docs, such as multiple editors, whatsoever) makes them laggy and inaccessible, when the same information could be saved on a Neocities page or a GameFAQs upload with far less lag, and better visibility to people outside your discord server to boot. And people wonder why their indie monster battlers can't grow a pvp community!

It may not be "accessibility" in a disability-accessibility sense, but it's still part of accessibility!

Do you run a website or somesuch? 👀

[wavesagainstrocks]

And you're absolutely in the right to be frustrated! Gosh, especially the comment section part. There are two of our 'modern' socmeds that come to mind immediately. They never sort replies in a conversation by when they were posted, instead they go by how many likes a comment in the thread has. Figuring out the order manually via hoping and guessing is maddening! I don't even wanna know what they said anymore!

I'm not the biggest fan of Discord, and I understand it can be a really easy way to organize things and talk to multiple people at once, however... it gets a little disheartening when it's the only form of communication with the developers of, like you said^^ an indie game or creative project. So I totally agree with everything you've mentioned!

I was on Neocities for a little while actually! Coding was a small hobby of mine (that I need to pick back up), but I was/still am lacking a lot of knowledge and felt like my site wasn't accessible enough so I want to try rewriting a new code someday!

[malymin]

And you're absolutely in the right to be frustrated! Gosh, especially the comment section part. There are two of our 'modern' socmeds that come to mind immediately. They never sort replies in a conversation by when they were posted, instead they go by how many likes a comment in the thread has. Figuring out the order manually via hoping and guessing is maddening! I don't even wanna know what they said anymore!

Ugh, that's SO annoying!

I'm not the biggest fan of Discord, and I understand it can be a really easy way to organize things and talk to multiple people at once, however... it gets a little disheartening when it's the only form of communication with the developers of, like you said^^ an indie game or creative project. So I totally agree with everything you've mentioned!

Speaking of being frustrated with Discord as the sole source of communication with a developer... have you seen this parody video about Fire Emblem romhacks? I'm not into Fire Emblem (I assume the experience of this video is enhanced if you've played it), but the video really speaks to an... experience I and a lot of people I know have had.

Ooo! If/when you start reworking your site, what kind of things will you put on it?

[wavesagainstrocks]

Oh wow, I hadn't seen that before until now and I keep laughing, it really is exactly like that! Thanks for giving me my new favorite video of the week :P

For the site, I'm honestly not all that sure! I've always wanted to try and display some artwork of mine, but I don't really know how to go about showing it in a way that isn't overly clunky and that doesn't take up a lot of room. My past attempts at running a site mostly had links and resources to other sites, and I think I still want to make that a main focus in a new one!

Have you ever dabbled in making a site/coding?

[malymin]

Ough, yea, art galleries are a problem I don't really know how to "solve".

But hey - with how dogshit search engines are these days (even before AI, what with all the SEO clickbait garbage clogging up results, though recent the AI-in-everything bubble certainly hasn't helped), I think we need human-curated resources + links-to-other-good-sites more than ever!

I dabbled a little... I currently have a very rough placeholder up on neocities, but I kind of want to tear down everything and start over from scratch...