HEIC image conversion

No, I didn't know how copy and paste works in GNOME. Now I do, thanks. And that would lead me to say "Yeah, just don't drag and drop massive PNG, TIF, BMP or any other poor choices for images into the forum" 🙂

if it's downconverting/transcoding them anyway.

It's not. As explained, the forum does not presently transcode, which is the crux of the matter here.
 
My actual point here is: I can't(??) see a file size before I click it. Most forum software shows filesize, if only in a hover.

What are we viewing on the forum that even needs to be that size? Pics
Service manuals. Yes, often we only want one 2Meg page but the PDF format makes it tough to tear-out a sheet or even screen-grab an oversize PDF page (especially with the crappy blurry compression some PDF engines apply to schematics).

But posting a 4 foot image to show a 20mm connection or chip-ID is usually pointless. If the poster can't be bothered to extract a detail, few readers will bother to squint very hard.
8 gigabit symmetrical fibre
The dial-up was not so very long ago, Spectrum are jerks. Then I was "50Mbps" then "100Mbps"; as long as I was the only person on the road surfing. Movie-hour could be far slower. Upload here has always been severely throttled-- I can see the speed meter bound off the limiter stop.

Then last month there was another truck on the road, fiber, and all-of-the sudden I got 200 then 300. Well, maybe they raised the download limiter but at 5:30pm the real limit is congestion. And that upload limit is still at 12Mbps (so even congested it will show the pathetic 10Mbps I pay for).
190Mbps.gif

I've asked the fiber provider (actually our land telephone company; finally saw the big handwriting on the wall and seven cellfone shops in town) to call when they see light. The price won't be better but in every other way they can't be worse.
 
No, I didn't know how copy and paste works in GNOME. Now I do, thanks. And that would lead me to say "Yeah, just don't drag and drop massive PNG, TIF, BMP or any other poor choices for images into the forum" 🙂



It's not. As explained, the forum does not presently transcode, which is the crux of the matter here.
I see. Now I understand. Are we looking into transcoding in the future?
Meanwhile, I'll look into yet another way to upload.
HEIC is out. Loading the HEIC and copying it to the clipboard and pasting it make a large PNG.
I guess now I'll try to find an easy way to transcode client side. I'll see if there is a plugin for Nemo so you can right click the HEIC and "convert to jpg" invoking a shell script to do the work.
 
I know. That's why I figured we could do the same thing here, but as Jason pointed out we aren't Facebook and that kind of tech costs money.
Bill Gates figured 640kB was enough, too LMAO and it was for a while.
Now, my phone has 12GB of RAM 🙂

@Jason Now I'm getting somewhere.
If it's already a JPG on disk and I copy the file instead of displaying it then copying it, it will preserve the format.
The clipboard system is magic in GNOME.
If I paste, I get this:
1670540241262.jpeg

but if I paste without formatting, I get this:
/data/incoming/caps.JPG
 
A quick Googling suggests that GNOME saves screenshots as PNG because, logically, most people taking a screenshot will be taking one of their desktop, and desktops are usually line art and digital art and text which is perfectly suited to lossless PNG.

Is there any chance you are opening a photo, then taking a screenshot of your desktop instead of working with the file itself to drag and drop that (or converting the file)?
 
There a 100% chance I do that - I thought I said that already.
I've never taken a screenshot of my desktop - there's nothing on it so why not just use the wallpaper graphic directly.
95% of the time, I use the screen capture tool because it's the fastest easiest way to do what I want to do.
I mean what would you rather do? Screen shot, and draw your selection, hit a button and it's copied to the clipboard ready to go as a PNG or load up GIMP, crop to selection, export the image, select the options, find the file on the disk, and then upload it here?
 
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FYI Yandex keeps my photos in full quality, but if I load them in the website to view them, a lower quality version is displayed. This is what I usually screenshot or right click and say copy.
The image I uploaded was the HEIC displayed on the screen instead of the webp image from the Yandex site.
 
Ahhhh... ok you're uploading cropped screenshots rather than uploading the original images. No solution for you until transcoding becomes an option, but honestly even then I wouldn't implement it as something that forcefully changes a user's preferred upload format. It's up to the user to determine the most appropriate format. There are very good use cases for PNG, forcing them to JPG would be a travesty. It would need some advanced AI to go "yes this PNG really should be a JPG and not a PNG". As such, this all appears quite messy and expensive to implement.

I'd recommend finding a screenshotting program that will output a sensible file format for the type of images you are screenshotting (ie: if photos, JPG).

I don't think it would be appropriate to make uploaded PNGs of schematics into blurry JPEGs (which would also be much larger!).
 
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How about this:

https://askubuntu.com/questions/128855/how-to-save-screenshots-as-jpg-automatically

Open "dconf-editor"

"dconf editor" is available for installation in the ubuntu software center

navigate to org > gnome > gnome-screenshot and change the default-file-type png to jpg.

Also, you could consider setting up some kind of macro. Map F8 to "open lightweight image editor, create new file, paste, save file to /tmp/tmp.jpg, close editor, open /tmp/tmp.jpg, copy to clipboard, delete /tmp/tmp.jpg".
 
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@Jason thanks for the info.
Using this info I can use make a keyboard shortcut to change the key with dconf-editor and use it as a way to switch between PNG and JPG.
I'm also interested in information on the costs etc of having a commercial area for Kodasonic.
 
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I would suggest to use Shutter for taking snapshots on a Linux machine, there one can select JPG, PNG or BMP, along with setting the compression quality ratio for the two former formats, as the default output.

PNG is better to use when saving for instance a schematics due to its nature with few solid colors and long straight lines although JPG does that well too, but one have to keep in mind that as PNG allows for transparent background, which can be turned off or removed with post-processing, say a schematics with black or other dark foreground colors will be very difficult to read when setting DiyA forum theme color to Dark, or otherwise using some browser extension with color settings on the darker side which is what I am using to save my eyes.

Here below a link to an example how such PNG images with transparent background look like on a dark browser/image-viewer background, with a short tutorial how to fix it in GIMP.
https://www.diyaudio.com/community/...rallel-instead-of-bridged.391167/post-7146386

edit: some tidbits on JPG vs PNG
https://www.adobe.com/creativecloud/file-types/image/comparison/jpeg-vs-png.html
https://www.techsmith.com/blog/jpg-vs-png/
https://www.digitaltrends.com/computing/jpeg-vs-png/
 
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Screenshots in Linux Ubuntu 20.04...

I have just been fiddling about with the installed Screenshot application in Ubuntu. You can grab a selected area of a desktop image easily enough, but it saves as a big PNG file:

170.2kB PNG screenshot.png


170.2kB

IIRC, the PNG format was designed to save images from the original Windows Paint program which was big blobs of a few colours for the most part, not designed for photos.

Right clicking on the file or just opening it allows you to open with other applications. The installed Shotwell then allows you to save in other formats, in this case JPEG:

28.4kB JPEG screenshot.jpg


28.4kB.

Shotwell also does TIFF. I can't remember what that is good for.

Much better for photos. Images with lots of blank space came out much closer in size. I think it is polite not to burn unnecessary bandwidth for lots of reasons.

I have learnt a new trick here, anyway. Thank you.

Best regards from Steve in Portsmouth, UK.
 
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