After taking a closer look at what commands run exactly in production, it turns out that I probably applied the IM parameters in the wrong order when I put together the survey (order matters, particularly for sharpening). I'll regenerate the images and make another (hopefully better) survey that will compare the status quo, chained thumbnails and single thumbnail reference.
On Mon, May 5, 2014 at 11:04 AM, Gilles Dubuc gilles@wikimedia.org wrote:
Buttons is French: Suiv. -> Make it English
That's a bug in SurveyMonkey, the buttons are in French because I was using the French version of the site at the time the survey was created, and now that text on those buttons can't be fixed. I'll make sure to switch SurveyMoney to English before creating the next one.
No "swap" or "overlay" function for being able to compare
SurveyMonkey is quite limited, it can't do that, unfortunately. The alternative would be to build my own survey from scratch, but that would be require a lot of resources for little benefit. This is really a one-off need.
I wonder if the mip-mapping approach could somehow be combined with tiles? If we want proper zooming for large images, we will have to split them up into tiles of various sizes, and serve only the tiles for the visible portion when the user zooms on a small section of the image. Splitting up an image is a fast operation, so maybe it could be done on the fly (with caching for a small subset based on traffic), in which case having a chain of scaled versions of the image would take care of the zooming use case as well.
Yes we could definitely have the reference thumbnail sizes be split up on the fly to generate tiles, when we get around to implementing proper zooming. It's as simple as making Varnish cache the tiles and the php backend generate them on the fly by splitting the reference thumbnails.
Regarding the survey I ran on wikitech-l, so far there are 26 respondents. It seems that on the images with a lot of edges (the test images provided by Rob) at least 30% of people can tell the difference in terms of quality/sharpness. On regular images people can't really tell. Thus, I wouldn't venture to do the full chaining, as a third of visitors will be able to tell that there's a quality degradation. I'll run another survey later in the week where instead of full chaining all the thumbs are generated based on the biggest thumb.
On Sat, May 3, 2014 at 1:25 AM, Gergo Tisza gtisza@wikimedia.org wrote:
On Thu, May 1, 2014 at 7:02 AM, Gilles Dubuc gilles@wikimedia.org wrote:
Another point about picking the "one true bucket list": currently Media Viewer's buckets have been picked based on the most common screen resolutions, because Media Viewer tries to always use the entire width
of
the screen to display the image, so trying to achieve a 1-to-1 pixel correspondence makes sense, because it should give the sharpest result possible to the average user.
I'm not sure the current size list is particularly useful for MediaViewer, since we are fitting images into the screen, and the huge majority of images are constrained by height, so the width of the image on the screen will be completely unrelated to the width bucket size. Having common screen sizes as width buckets would be useful if we would be filling instead of fitting (something that might make sense for paged media).
I wonder if the mip-mapping approach could somehow be combined with tiles? If we want proper zooming for large images, we will have to split them up into tiles of various sizes, and serve only the tiles for the visible portion when the user zooms on a small section of the image. Splitting up an image is a fast operation, so maybe it could be done on the fly (with caching for a small subset based on traffic), in which case having a chain of scaled versions of the image would take care of the zooming use case as well. _______________________________________________ Wikitech-l mailing list Wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l