Forums / Maintenance / Report Problems

This topic was brought up by others in the past, but since it got no response from the KYM staff, I'll try again.

As I understand, KYM generates previews for all images uploaded to it. These previews have slightly different URLs and are displayed in image galleries ("masonry" files) and on image pages themselves ("newsfeed" files), and are supposed to have smaller filesizes than the original files, so that they are quicker to load. But when it comes to heavy GIFs, layer transparency is often lost (as demonstrated in the link above) and filesizes actually increase drastically as a result.

The original file is 5.85 MB, just about under the limit. However, the "masonry" file is 13.8 MB and the "newsfeed" file is 39.5 MB! It's ridiculous. Why can't the system check if the auto-generated preview turns out to be heavier than the original file, and if so, simply use the original file as a preview file as well instead?

This problem is also pretty visible in images which are sized similarly to what their thumbnails or preview versions would have been. All things considered, the physical space images on KYM occupy has never really been an issue. All removed content, included the thousands of removed images, are still a part of KYM, but will 404 to unauthorized users, for example. As you mentioned, each image is effectively kept as a number of separate, slightly altered versions for different sections of the site (very similar to how it stores user avatars ). Preventing this one weird thing KYM does (assuming it wouldn't generate the new images to begin with, instead of omitting them) is just a fancy way of getting the images to load slightly faster.

Why can’t the system check if the auto-generated preview turns out to be heavier than the original file

So to answer your question as to why not, I'd say because that sounds pretty complicated for what would ultimately be a minor improvement to how fast images load on KYM. There are a number of other factors that cause KYM to occasionally run slow as fuck; this one seems like high effort, little reward in contrast. But hey, now I know which thread to link when people discuss why our filesizes are disgusting.