- #DOES INSTAGRAM COMPRESS IMAGES UPDATE#
- #DOES INSTAGRAM COMPRESS IMAGES ANDROID#
- #DOES INSTAGRAM COMPRESS IMAGES SOFTWARE#
But without the official word from developers, the speculation couldn’t be fully confirmed. However, what seemed to be the most compelling cause that had surfaced was the simple fact that Instagram, and possibly VSCO, had a poor implementation of a downsampling algorithm, specifically the Nearest Neighbor resampling. Some blamed the problem directly on Android's built-in bitmap downsampling algorithms. Up until now, we only had speculation as to what the reason for this problem could be. The quality loss and type of artifacts noticed were similar to that of Instagram, so some were quick to think that there was a line uniting the dots.
#DOES INSTAGRAM COMPRESS IMAGES ANDROID#
Touted “the new standard of Android Photography”, some were quick to notice that the application fell short on these claims.
Users also noticed a similar occurrence with the popular camera and picture editing application VSCO Cam.
#DOES INSTAGRAM COMPRESS IMAGES UPDATE#
As the months went by, the reports after every Instagram update kept reporting the same issue, to the point where this problem became a running gag amongst forum users that shortly followed every iteration of the application. While popular internet forums like Reddit were trying to figure out the cause of their daily outrage, the injustice seemed to have no logical foundation other than the possible explanation of Android hardware being intrinsically inferior in the computing power department, or the fact that, given the vast array of lower-end Android devices, these measures had to be taken to ensure a consistent user experience across the entire platform - regardless of how much you paid for your phone. But there is still a question left unanswered here: Why Android and not iOS?
#DOES INSTAGRAM COMPRESS IMAGES SOFTWARE#
The pictures that millions of Instagrammers, and I, take and upload every day directly contradict the narrative of the engineering prowess of these superpowers of the tech world, who are supposed to pump a big fraction of their revenue on investing back into their software to provide the best user experience. Names such as deflation (used for PNG) or the Lempel-Ziv-Welch algorithm (typically used for GIF) run through many Computer Science classrooms nowadays, ring in many programmers’ ears, and with the further development and documentation of increasingly more efficient compression techniques, you’d expect the billionaire platform to incorporate reasonably efficient algorithms to output a very nice picture while making the technicalities not too taxing on their servers and the user’s hardware.īut this simply isn’t the case. Techniques to reduce or optimize file size are learned by many programmers in their academic pursuits regardless of the field they will develop in. This means that the compression reduced the file size of the original by a factor of almost 13 - which isn't necessarily bad in some contexts. While the original 1:1 crop file’s size was 1.6MB, the new resized and compressed image is 125KB. The compression artifacts around borders and color gradients are stunningly noticeable to even the untrained eye.
You’d expect the image to come out looking rather similar to what was seen originally, but the result was underwhelming.
I simply grabbed the squared JPG crop and posted it on my Instagram without any added filters, effects, or tweaking any values. To not account for the "Instacrop" downsampling that would understandably destroy the detail of such a high-resolution file by later downscaling it to Instagram’s native 640圆40 pixel output, I cropped it to a JPG of the 1:1 aspect ratio of Instagram uploads to see the direct effects of the post-processing algorithm and its compression on this file. The original shot weighs 4.34MB and was shot at 9.6MP.
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