Hi James, thanks for the feedback, its exactly the type of feedback i was looking for.

I did see your comments on the vp earlier. I hadn't responded because i wanted to do a little research first to better understand what filters do, and what our options are in the various tools we use (i'm definitely not an expert on image manipulation or signal processing, more just gluing together pieces other people have made. However learning about this stuff has been quite interesting)

So at first glance:

Our needs are:
*resize images relatively quickly (resizing done on demand at the moment for first request. If it takes over a minute, that is very bad)
*resize images in under 512mb

Vips has some interpolation options. In my testing they did not seem to give very good results. We are probably going to need to use vips for big files in order to meet the above listed needs. In the current system we make an intermediary thumbnail ~2048px, and then shrink further from that. We could perhaps explore using fancier algorithms on the second step.

Ill respond more fully at VP, when i have a more firm grip on the different options we can take.

--bawolff
On Oct 4, 2014 5:55 AM, "James Heald" <j.heald@ucl.ac.uk> wrote:
>
> Hi Brian,
>
> Thanks for taking this on.
>
> I've put some comments up in response to your post at
> https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:Village_pump#Experimenting_with_using_VIPS_to_render_large_tiff_files
>
> The short version is that many of these big files are maps or engravings, and really need an anti-aliassing filter (eg a Lanczos filter) when they are reduced, otherwise we get nasty "jaggies" and other aliassing artefacts.
>
> Unfortunately, it seems that VIPS does not do any anti-aliassing (and nor does the Image Magick 'thumbnail' option we currently use).
>
> It's a shame when we have very good high-resolution originals, to be presenting downsized versions which look so poor.
>
> For comparison, I have put up copies of a couple of the images rescaled to 1280px using Image Magick's "resize" command, to show what potentially can be achievable at this resolution, if we allow a few more clock cycles.
>
> All best,
>
>    James.
>
>
>
>
> On 02/10/2014 22:57, Brian Wolff wrote:
>>
>> Hi everyone.
>>
>> tl;dr: Can we do https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/164476
>>
>> Now that the pre-requisite patches for using VIPS with tiff has been
>> merged (Woo!), lets umm use it.
>>
>> So for those who don't know what vips is, vips is an alternative to
>> image magick which can scale certain file formats in essentially
>> constant memory (Or probably to be pedantic, linear in the number of
>> pixels in the resulting file, instead of linear in the number of
>> pixels in the source). This means we would be able to make thumbnails
>> no matter how big the source file is. Which is good because we have
>> lots of very high resolution tiff files, such as [[File:Zoomit2.tif]]
>> and [[File:Zentralbibliothek Zürich - Mittelalterliche Stadt -
>> 000005203.tif]]. We already use VIPS to scale png files larger than 20
>> megapixels, and non-progressive jpeg files can be scaled efficiently
>> with image magick, so tiff is the current pain point in terms of
>> scaling limits (although GIF is also painful).
>>
>> I would like to propose the following:
>>
>> First we experiment with turning it on for files > 50 megapixels.
>> Currently we do not even try to render such files, so I doubt this
>> will cause any community angst. To that end I proposed a patch (
>> https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/164476 ) that uses the following
>> settings:
>>
>>                 array(
>>                         'conditions' => array(
>>                                 'mimeType' => 'image/tiff',
>>                                 'minShrinkFactor' => 1.2,
>>                                 'minArea' => 5e7,
>>                         ),
>>                         'sharpen' => array( 'sigma' => 0.8 ),
>>                 )
>>
>> This will turn the feature on for big files (which currently do not
>> render), and also enable sharpening (Most tiff images benefit from it
>> and the community has asked for it repeatedly, I think its less
>> disruptive to enable sharpening at the same time as VIPS, instead of
>> two separate changes to tiff rendering).
>>
>> I would propose we let that sit for a little bit. We should than have
>> a community discussion (With the commons community, since its hard to
>> have a discussion with every community, and commons (+esp. Glams) are
>> the people who care the most about this) to see if the community likes
>> that. Hopefully if all is well we could move to stage 2, which would
>> be something like:
>>
>>                 array(
>>                         'conditions' => array(
>>                                 'mimeType' => 'image/tiff',
>>                                 'minShrinkFactor' => 1.2,
>>                         ),
>>                         'sharpen' => array( 'sigma' => 0.8 ),
>>                 ),
>>                 array(
>>                         'conditions' => array(
>>                                 'mimeType' => 'image/tiff',
>>                         ),
>>                 ),
>>
>>
>> Anyways, thoughts. Does this sound like a good plan? Someone want to
>> be bold and deploy my change ;)
>>
>> --bawolff
>>
>> _______________________________________________
>> Multimedia mailing list
>> Multimedia@lists.wikimedia.org
>> https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/multimedia
>>
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> Multimedia mailing list
> Multimedia@lists.wikimedia.org
> https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/multimedia