Aryeh Gregor wrote:
On Sun, Aug 2, 2009 at 1:33 PM, Gregory Maxwellgmaxwell@gmail.com wrote:
In other cases the gif tends to be larger, loads slower, etc. They can be converted to PNG losslessly, so you should probably do so. What am I missing?
That a lot of people don't know the above and upload GIFs anyway, and until we can fix all users of each of these images, it would be nice to not serve the full-size file all the time. (Anyone want to make the planned transcode-on-upload infrastructure work for images too? :) )
Also, Commons alone has almost a hundred thousand existing GIF files. Converting them all to PNG would be a significant job, especially since changing the format (and thus the suffix) means that they can't just be reuploaded under the same title.
(Which means you have to copy the description page and the old upload history, update links on all other projects, give any non-Wikimedia projects using ForeignAPIRepo time to update their links and hope that they actually do so, and even after you've done all that, it *still* ends up messing with watchlists, user contribution histories and old article versions because there's no way to update those. Eugh.)