On 07/12/2013 07:59 PM, Sumana Harihareswara wrote:
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 × 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 let anyone upload a PNG to our site that's more than 50 megapixels. 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 bryan.tongminh@gmail.com who wrote most of the code, and to WMF's Greg Grossmeier, Jan Gerber, and Tim Starling for working on this!
This launch is delayed till we can fix https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=51370 . Release Manager Greg Grossmeier is ill right now but he'll have more information when he returns to work. Sorry for the delay.