Feedback for "Upcoming Changes to PNG Image Support"

[Abzol]

In very many cases art will have large areas that png can optimize well (such as monocolor backgrounds), so long as you tune your filesize comparison well you should be good with preserving artwork as png when appropriate.

[sillyvizion]

hi there,

i’ll preface this by saying i’m not incredibly knowledgeable in the architecture that goes behind image hosting, but i do know, as an artist who uses twitter as one of my primary platforms, the continued changes that put artists at a disadvantage is making twitter less and less desirable as a platform, and it’s incredibly frustrating for many artists, that it feels like this site is just pushing against us and making us having to jump through constant hoops to post our art in acceptable compression. not every artist uses programs that allows them to save in PNG8, or for web, or whatever else. for instance, an incredible popular tool artists use, Paint Tool SAI (1/2) does not offer any such specific support. this means that artists have to run art through other programs, that they may not be able to accommodate, to post.

this makes Twitter less appealing to us. it’s already quite a hassle to do the single pixel trick - i can’t just post my art as is, i have to make sure i’ve edited it beforehand to get around twitter’s compression. the simple fact that we had to find a workaround to bypass compression entirely means that the compression used is not viable for artists. it makes art look horrible, that’s the truth. especially images with colours in the red range, or gradients, it looks awful. yes, it works for photography, but that’s exactly it - JPEG was invented for photography, not for art.

i understand space and broadband concerns, i definitely do. but a lot of other sites are able to manage this, so i’m not really sure why Twitter can’t? you COULD allow us to upload quality 10 JPEGs and not compress them further, but i’m concerned that wouldn’t ever be implemented. you could also provide users the option to choose if they want compressed or uncompressed images, for bandwith concerns. i just feel like there are better solutions for this than dropping transparency support all together?! it’s nearly 2019, transparency is used a lot, and just dumping it entirely feels like shooting yourselves in the foot.

i apologize for an emotionally charged response, it is just upsetting to have to constantly fight against a site to provide art - something which many users use twitter specifically for, and would quit otherwise. thank you for reading, and i really hope this change can be re-evaluated.

[NolanOBrien]

hi there,

i’ll preface this by saying i’m not incredibly knowledgeable in the architecture that goes behind image hosting, but i do know, as an artist who uses twitter as one of my primary platforms, the continued changes that put artists at a disadvantage is making twitter less and less desirable as a platform, and it’s incredibly frustrating for many artists, that it feels like this site is just pushing against us and making us having to jump through constant hoops to post our art in acceptable compression. not every artist uses programs that allows them to save in PNG8, or for web, or whatever else. for instance, an incredible popular tool artists use, Paint Tool SAI (1/2) does not offer any such specific support. this means that artists have to run art through other programs, that they may not be able to accommodate, to post.

this makes Twitter less appealing to us. it’s already quite a hassle to do the single pixel trick - i can’t just post my art as is, i have to make sure i’ve edited it beforehand to get around twitter’s compression. the simple fact that we had to find a workaround to bypass compression entirely means that the compression used is not viable for artists. it makes art look horrible, that’s the truth. especially images with colours in the red range, or gradients, it looks awful. yes, it works for photography, but that’s exactly it - JPEG was invented for photography, not for art.

i understand space and broadband concerns, i definitely do. but a lot of other sites are able to manage this, so i’m not really sure why Twitter can’t? you COULD allow us to upload quality 10 JPEGs and not compress them further, but i’m concerned that wouldn’t ever be implemented. you could also provide users the option to choose if they want compressed or uncompressed images, for bandwith concerns. i just feel like there are better solutions for this than dropping transparency support all together ?! it’s nearly 2019, transparency is used a lot, and just dumping it entirely feels like shooting yourselves in the foot.

i apologize for an emotionally charged response, it is just upsetting to have to constantly fight against a site to provide art - something which many users use twitter specifically for, and would quit otherwise. thank you for reading, and i really hope this change can be re-evaluated.

Thank you for replying @sillyvizion

You particular callout on the burden this is putting on artists is valid. We are going to bring that feedback in specifically and evaluate what we can do to better support artists with tooling specifically. I don’t run the roadmap, unfortunately, but I would like to push for more tooling to help.

I can understand being very convinced that the compression used is not viable for artists. Would you be willing to engage on Twitter and provide me with some specific examples? I would like to work with the examples you have in mind to see how far we have to go in finding even better solutions. DM or @ mention me freely https://twitter.com/NolanOBrien

I would like to fight for artists too, and I am. Big co life makes conflicts of priorities a frustration, particularly for users who feel particularly left out. I hope I can continue to help. Thank you.

[dstaley]

Will this impact images already uploaded to Twitter (for example, avatars)? Or will this only impact images uploaded after the change is implemented?

[aumoras]

The thing about artists posting higher resolution pictures on twitter is that it makes it easier for thieves to repost their artwork and have it printed and sold on say t-shirts etc. It’s not just posting a higher resolution personal picture. Which is usually why they will resize it down to a smaller size without slapping a huge watermark over it at the same time.

[NolanOBrien]

Will this impact images already uploaded to Twitter (for example, avatars)? Or will this only impact images uploaded after the change is implemented?

@dstaley

This is a good question and though I thought it was applied everywhere, I am seeing that the info I am working off of doesn’t specify one way or the other. Let me get back to you on this.

[NolanOBrien]

The thing about artists posting higher resolution pictures on twitter is that it makes it easier for thieves to repost their artwork and have it printed and sold on say t-shirts etc. It’s not just posting a higher resolution personal picture. Which is usually why they will resize it down to a smaller size without slapping a huge watermark over it at the same time.

Thanks for commenting @aumoras

This has come to our attention and we are considering use cases here.

The current suggestions are to use a watermark (which you’ve already mentioned) or to scale up the image (so that each pixel is 4x4 pixels or so) to preserve quality better without giving away something printable.

[NolanOBrien]

Will this impact images already uploaded to Twitter (for example, avatars)? Or will this only impact images uploaded after the change is implemented?

@dstaley

This is a good question and though I thought it was applied everywhere, I am seeing that the info I am working off of doesn’t specify one way or the other. Let me get back to you on this.

@dstaley

Just confirmed this change will apply to all image categories, including avatars. Do you have any follow up questions about that?

[dstaley]

So, just to clarify, this change will be applied retroactively to avatars already uploaded? (Basically do I need to reupload my existing PNG-24 avatar as a palletted PNG-8 avatar to avoid JPEG compression?)

[NolanOBrien]

@dstaley

This will only apply to new image uploads. Legacy avatars will be unchanged. Once the change happens, using a PNG8 avatar is a good idea though if you are able to do so.

[RME]

I’ve confirmed Twitter is using something similar to MozJPEG so that is covered.

Also, I have tested converting two Twitter-JPEGs to WebP without visible quality loss and these are the results:

JPEG is 2x the size of a similar WebP image.

WebP DuFT…	Effort 6, Quality 75	->	281->142kB	49% smaller
WebP DvG9…	Effort 6, Quality 75	->	248->110kB	55% smaller

First image: https://pbs.twimg.com/media/DuFT8cdV4AADLBT.jpg:large
Second image: https://pbs.twimg.com/media/DvG9fFOU8AI-JIh.jpg:large

Converter tool: https://squoosh.app (App made by Google)

[isaiahodhner]

Twitter will also preserve the PNG image if it maintains a smaller file size than the JPEG version at our own internal metric (basically, we’re going to compare the JPEG file size to the PNG file size and the smaller one is used – but the metric could change to be more sophisticated so we used loose language in our announcement). Using tools like tinypng.com or ImageOptim might help achieve this.

It would be nice if Twitter ran a PNG optimizer on the image, and took the smallest of the resulting PNG and compressed JPEG (perhaps using gzipped sizes since the files would be going over the network).

Further, no-one wants a magic black box that sometimes ruins your art. You should be able to preview exactly how it will show up, and you should be able to control it.

[singer_joseph]

I’m going to be blunt. Don’t try to fix what isn’t broken. Don’t let the bosses make things more complex than they have to be, or more inconvenient for artists. You may not make the roadmap, but you can be a roadblock if you don’t think the map is right.

[JapanYoshi777]

Well, time to link to Imgur and make a thumbnail that says “FULL RES ON IMGUR” for every post.

[castpixel]

@NolanOBrien thanks for engaging. It might be a good idea to provide an override to the default, so users can opt out of compression out of the box. Otherwise it’s just going to be a lot of discontent and every attempt will be made to override or hack the compression. Which will force twitter to patch until it’s unhackable and artists on twitter to leave. My own pixelart content is safe as png8 but I’m still thinking of leaving in solidarity, if enough artists are upset enough to leave.

Also how about adding proper gifs at last? Pixelart absolutely suffers when converted to your video format (stutter when looping, hideous compression artifacts) and it results in larger files. A size test will confirm it every time. I tweeted a dubious and half-working workaround 5 years ago (506px width) and I still get asked about it as if I’m an expert. This isn’t normal

[Darth_Biomech]

So, let me get this straight. You guys claim that you are supporting the artists, while at the same time robbing them of the last option to post content with good quality? At least save the unmodified originals and make them be accessible through the interface or something! Same goes for the gifs. Give us normal gifs!
Yes, I don’t understand why so many artists arrived at twitter when it is supposed to be a platform for posting tiny text messages, that doesn’t sound like art-friendly place. But they’re here now. And this “improvement” is ABSOLUTELY screws them over. And for what? So that some dude could open his feed in 2.15 seconds instead of 3.5 seconds?

[maxst]

What about Animated PNGs?
Please don’t convert them into JPGs.
If you must, convert them into video, like you do with Animated GIFs.
But don’t convert them into JPGs.

[dmitriid]

Don’t forget the absolutely random way Twitter crops images when displaying them in the feed. You never know if it will be the middle of the image displayed, or just the bottom-left corner, or some other part.

[reckingstacks]

Hi, artist here. I just want to throw my hat into the “bad move” pile. This really is a horrible change for artists. I post all of my polished work on Twitter, but I also post unfinished pieces and sketches, and the compression makes these especially ugly. Uploading a higher-res image, in JPEG format, to compensate for this actually results in a file size about three times bigger (in a recent sketch) than the 50%-size PNG format I would usually upload it in, so…

Also, after a quick test just now: when uploading a jpeg and a png of this same image, at the same resolution, with the jpeg at 85% quality and clocking in at about 100kb bigger than the png file size, I’m still seeing compression on both images (not the same amount, as I first thought, but it is distinctly there) once they’ve actually uploaded and posted, so idk what the back-end file-size comparison thing is doing, but something seems wrong here. As I understand it, it should be retaining the png file if the png is smaller than the compressed jpeg?

[DJDavid98]

So let me get this straight, you think having a regular size PNG-24 with great quality is worse than having a 4x upscaled JPEG of the same image? There’s a healthy limit for when limitations like this make sense and this goes right through it. Let artists upload a PNG then see if your 4x upscale method actually reduces the file size compared to the original. I also agree with the others here that having the system decide what’s best for users behind the scenes is about as bad UX as it gets. Let the user know well before posting that their image will lose quality (which is looking like >90% of images uploaded by artists I know). Optimize the images on your end as much as possible before making the users hack around and suffer quality loss. Now that Tumblr shot itself in the foot a great number of artists are flocking to Twitter, are you really sure this is the warmest welcome you could give them? They’ll see this announcement and pack up shop to move to a platform that cares. Maybe try getting that through to the executives.