[QA] resizing big images will get faster next week

[Sumana Harihareswara]

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.png/1000px-Thompson-Pond-2009.png
.  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 at gmail.com> who wrote
most of the code, and to WMF's Greg Grossmeier, Jan Gerber, and Tim
Starling for working on this!
-- 
Sumana Harihareswara
Engineering Community Manager
Wikimedia Foundation