I've been spending a lot of time recently looking—from a user's perspective—at how MediaWiki handles TIFFs. I'm interested in this because in my work with the U.S. National Archives, we uploaded many tens of thousands of TIFFs. I am planning to upload far more by the end of this year, potentially at higher resolutions, and the new GLAMwiki Toolset raises the possibility that other institutions may do the same in the future. Even though TIFFs seem esoteric, I think there is a high potential for impact in improving the user experience around them.

The main issue is that MediaWiki's handling of TIFFs is unsatisfactory enough that projects like Commons are resorting to asking contributors to upload exact duplicates of any TIFFs as JPG as well and treat the TIFF as just an archival copy for downloading, but not for categorizing or embedding on Wikimedia projects—even though MediaWiki generates JPG thumbnails of TIFFs for display in articles and even (thanks to Brian) now let users download full-resolution copies of TIFFs in JPG format. This a bad workaround, since it introduces unnecessary duplication, and identical pages which are left out of sync.

I'm hoping to interest you all in resolving a few of the outstanding bugs related to display of TIFFs so we can abandon this practice in the future. A couple of these are relatively minor interface design issues. Here are the 5 bug reports I think are most critical here:

1.) TIFFs are less sharpened than JPG equivalents.

2.) Display file format of preview if different format from original file

3.) More prominent display of both full-resolution files available for download

4.) Consider raising $wgMaxImageArea limit for images

Anyone have thoughts about these?

Dominic

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