Showing a warning and making the user explicitly chose is one option to explore, but it has some potential drawbacks: - For users that can display the image, the workflow is less fluent requiring one more upfront decision. - For users that cannot display the image in more detail (they may just wanted the image a bit bigger to read some label) the options are to (a) crash the browser or (b) do nothing. An alternative behaviour I was considering for huge files, is to load a "large" version of it (not the original huge one) and indicate so while the image is loading ("due to its big size, a scaled version of the file will be loaded instead. You can access the download icon to get or display the original file."). In this way, most users that are interested in just viewing some more details will be able to do so just by clicking, and those specifically interested on displaying huge images will do that in an explicit and more informed way (file size is shown in the download panel) and with a "download" option (less likely to break crash their browser) next to the "view in browser" one. In any case, a notion of when a file is considered huge, and whether we should estimate that on resolution or file size will be very useful for whichever approach we choose. Pau On Thu, Oct 2, 2014 at 6:56 AM, Brian Wolff <bawolff(a)gmail.com> wrote: -- Pau Giner Interaction Designer Wikimedia Foundation

On Thu, Oct 2, 2014 at 9:02 AM, Jean-Frédéric <jeanfrederic.wiki(a)gmail.com> wrote: Ah, great, thanks for the link, Jean-Fred. In the back of my mind I thought I'd seen something about this on Bugzilla. As I pointed out in a meeting an on-wiki and this bug confirms, this is a problem that exists for viewing large files in general, not just Media Viewer, so I'd like to make sure that the solution is practical for the file page as well and not just put together because there was a problem with Media Viewer. The bug is a big enough issue outside of Media Viewer that it deserves the attention. -- Keegan Peterzell Community Liaison, Product Wikimedia Foundation

On 10/2/14, Brion Vibber <bvibber(a)wikimedia.org> wrote: That's already a thing: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/7/70/Example.png?download --bawolff

The reason why this particular feature (click on image) doesn't download the file is because that's what a significant amount of the users requested. It's a poor man's zoom, so to speak, and it's reproducing a workflow that people used to have on the file page and missed in media viewer. I think we're paying the price of implementing this hack as a placeholder for zoom. To me the point where we have to build convoluted mechanisms (especially extra menus, warnings...) to compensate for a strange feature is usually a sign that it shouldn't be built like this in the first place. Pau proposed a good compromise. I.e. clicking should open a bigger image (the "zoomed" version) but not the original, unless the original happens to be smaller than what we consider to be the bigger version. I think that's a smarter placeholder hack than what we're currently doing. It's worth a shot. On Thu, Oct 2, 2014 at 11:09 PM, Brion Vibber <bvibber(a)wikimedia.org> wrote: