Unclear photos

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  mynths · Member · Dec 6, 2015 at 3:04 pm

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  Hello!

  I’ve had a problem with my photos lately… Maybe it’s because I changed my theme?

  I take all my photos with a Canon camera and they’re of good quality. I edit them in photoshop. But when I upload them in my posts, they become very unclear and loose focus… What can I do to avoid this?

  The blog I need help with is: (visible only to logged in users)

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  kokkieh · Staff · Dec 8, 2015 at 2:43 pm

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  Hi there,

  The problem here is that the WordPress.com editor is not good at resizing images, and you’re uploading images that are much bigger than your site can display.

  The images on your site are between 3000 and 5000 pixels wide, while your theme can at most display image 990 pixels wide if you use the full-width layout.

  If you resize your images to the size you need them to be before uploading them to your site this should stop happening, and your media storage space should last much longer as well.

  Let me know if you have more questions about this, or if using smaller images don’t help.

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  mynths · Member · Dec 9, 2015 at 9:58 am

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  Okay I see :) I’ll try this, thank you!

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  mynths · Member · Dec 21, 2015 at 1:12 pm

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  Hello again!

  I tried doing this -I rezised the images to 990 pixels wide. But I’m not sure I see much difference. It’s just so weird that it doesn’t always happen -just sometimes. And I use exactly the same method for editing and saving my photos each time. Is there anything else I can do?

  Thanks!

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  mynths · Member · Dec 21, 2015 at 1:41 pm

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  You know what, it actually looked like it got a lot more clear when I saved it in a .png file instead of .jpeg :)

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  kokkieh · Staff · Dec 22, 2015 at 7:21 am

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  I don’t see images that look particularly blurry, but then I haven’t seen the originals. As you say this doesn’t happen all the time, if you can give me a link to a specific post where this is happening I can look if I see anything that might be causing this.

  On the other hand, if using PNG images works for you that’s fine as well. Just keep in mind that PNGs have a much bigger file size than JPEGs, so it will cause your media storage space to be used up much faster.

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  mishrashutosh · Member · Dec 22, 2015 at 7:56 am

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  I am not sure if this is related (or even whether WordPress.com uses Photon), but this might be happening because Photon switched to WebP for compatible browsers a few months ago.

  I found this thread on the Jetpack forum: https://wordpress.org/support/topic/photon-image-quality-degradation?replies=2

  I have also noticed a slight degradation of image quality on my (self hosted) blog these last few weeks. It might be because Photon moved to a higher level of compression by default.

  My tech blog has mostly PNG screenshots, so it’s not much of an issue, but for people using high res JPG images in photography, travel, or food blogs, poor quality can be an eyesore.

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  mynths · Member · Dec 22, 2015 at 9:33 pm

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  Okay, but what happens when my media storage space is used up? Can’t I just delete old images and then upload more?

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  timethief · Member · Dec 22, 2015 at 9:54 pm

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  Okay, but what happens when my media storage space is used up?

  WordPress.com provides free blogs and hosts them free of charge. There are no bandwidth charges. All WordPress.com blogs come with 3000 megabytes (~3 GBs) of space for storing uploaded files and images. Free features are listed here https://en.wordpress.com/features/ See here for the paid upgrade for adding storage space https://en.support.wordpress.com/space-upgrade/

  Can’t I just delete old images and then upload more?

  Deleting images uploaded into your media library removes them from the servers and that means they cannot be displayed in posts and pages you embedded them into. https://onecoolsite.wordpress.com/2012/03/26/cropper-or-proper-image-preparation/

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  kokkieh · Staff · Dec 23, 2015 at 4:43 am

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  Regarding Photon, it’s not the level of compression that’s the problem (if you read here you will see that Photon uses high quality compression, so you shouldn’t see any noticeable loss in quality) but rather the problem is that not all browsers fully support Photon.

  As for running out of space, I recommend first resizing images to the size you need before uploading, and then there are also several optimization apps that can trim down file size of images without affecting quality. I can recommend PNGGauntlet and JPEGMini (both free) for those two image formats.

  When you run out of space, if you don’t want to upgrade, you can also upload your images to services like Flickr or Google+ Photos and embed them in your WordPress.com site from there.

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  mishrashutosh · Member · Dec 23, 2015 at 4:57 pm

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  I don’t want to hijack this thread, but it’s clear that the image quality served to browsers supporting WebP (Chrome) is a bit worse than those not supporting it (Edge).

  Here’s a side by side comparison: http://i.imgur.com/EFyqExs.png

  If WordPress.com uses the same setting as Jetpack Photon, then this might be causing quality issues.

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  mynths · Member · Dec 25, 2015 at 5:24 pm

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  Okay, but is there somewhere on my wordpress page I can see how much of the media storage I’ve used?

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  mishrashutosh · Member · Dec 26, 2015 at 5:55 am

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  Hi,

  If you go to http://mynths.com/wp-admin, you will see available space in the “At a Glance” box.