GNOME Bugzilla – Bug 317100
Add plug-in for image optimization
Last modified: 2005-09-30 22:17:05 UTC
Many users would like to take pictures taken on a digital camera and optimize them for web display or sending through email. This entails reducing the file size. For this, three different tools can be used: a cropping to get rid of unneeded parts of the image, rescaling the image to a smaller pixel size and saving to JPG with higher compression. I suggest a dialog that will allow you to save an optimized copy of your image (yeah, it's not a "tool" per se but that's the closest I could come in bugzilla). This dialog would incorporate all three actions into one, with one added feature which is telling you the file size before you commit your changes. The user will be able to play with compression level, rescale amount/pixel size and crop values and see the effect on file size. I imagine it as a not very accurate tool - exact numbers are not neccessary for this type of application. A couple of sliders for rescale and compression and a draggable crop on a preview window will do. Better accuracy with input boxes and all can be tucked away in an "advanced" mode. I imagine this dialog to be placed in the "file" dialog below "save". Another thought I had about this tool is that the time to recalculate file size would need to be speeded up somehow to provide better interactivity. maybe a beeter approach would be to give estimates (based on a single pass of the specific image) and not exact file sizes.
Created attachment 52594 [details] mockup Mockup of proposed dialog
Shouldn't the filesize display in the JPEG plug-in be sufficient for this? Otherwise, I'd say this is a duplicate of bug #98017. Do you agree?
Michael, we are still waiting for you to answer my question ...
Not quite. The point is to provide a combined resize-crop-compression tool, which the jpg save dialog does not provide. This is something I thought of after seeing many users asking on a graphics board how to "make the file smaller". They did not realize there were to separate factors involved, and I thought - well, why not combine them? As for Photoshop's Save for Web, this is a feature geared for web designers, to find the optimal way to save artwork for the web. There is a way to change image size with it, but it is slow and tucked away in another tab, because usualy when saving for the web, the image has to be in a fixed size (determined by the design of the site it is a part of), so changing the size is rarely useful. there are also options to use GIf or PNG, optimize the pallette, set opacity and matting options, etc. What I'm suggesting is a tool aimed not at web designers but at people who have a digital camera and want to optimize them fro sending in email or archiving or posting them to a web board or uploading to image-shack or whatever. In short, a situation where the exact size is not very important, the type of image is ALWAYS jpg and it's always a picture not artwork, and what's important is to get a balance between rescaling and size to get the file below a certain file size. To sum it up. while technically they are similar, the two suggestions have different uses and require different user interfaces - one is for web designers, the other for digital photographers who want to share their pictures without sending large files. They could of course be combined, however
I don't see the fundamental difference in saving for the web or saving for email or a web board. This report is IMO clearly a duplicate of the Save for Web feature request. *** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of 98017 ***