For your information. See also the thread on VP

-------- Original Message -------- Subject: resizing big images will get faster next week Date: Fri, 12 Jul 2013 16:59:04 -0700 From: Sumana Harihareswara sumanah@wikimedia.org Organization: Wikimedia Foundation To: Coordination of technology deployments across languages/projects wikitech-ambassadors@lists.wikimedia.org CC: qa@lists.wikimedia.org

Thursday July 18th, we're going to deploy something new on the sites: VipsScaler - https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:VipsScaler .

Upside: Resizing big images will be faster and more reliable, leading to fewer errors -- no matter whether you get a different size by clicking on a link like "Other resolutions: 320 в 239 pixels" or hand-editing the filename to https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/c/c9/Thompson-Pond-2009... . Also, right now, there is an "area limit"- we don't thumbnail images bigger than 50 MP. The area limit will go away; that should be nice for Wiki Loves Monuments! (There will still be a filesize limit, of bytes).

Downside: We'll see slight changes in visual quality, and a few images might break. We've already tested this ourselves, but we'd love more testing ahead of time to check for bugs so we can fix them early next week.

There's a test page at https://test2.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:VipsTest that you can use to test this and find bugs before we roll this out on Thursday the 18th. I'm about to notify Commons on-wiki, but I'd especially welcome more help liaising with Commons on this.

Thanks to volunteer Bryan Tong Minh who wrote most of the code, and to WMF's Greg Grossmeier, Jan Gerber, and Tim Starling for working on this! -- Sumana Harihareswara Engineering Community Manager Wikimedia Foundation