Hi there, i’m trying to paste some screenshots of a remote terminal, i’ve been trying various resolutions and also put the images in the lightbox, and even though it’s now readable and zoomable, the images are still blurred.
I’ve downloaded the image back from asset manager and notice that there is an ‘original’ ‘large’ ‘small’ and ‘thumbnail’ version of my image and i suspect that evolve is using ‘large’ … I can see that even the large version is blurry, so what I would like to do is force evolve to use ‘original’ . How can I do this?
Sorry; I don’t know the exact answer to your question but I have an alternate solution.
If you host the images elsewhere, e.g., AWS S3 Bucket or HubSpot, etc., and then link to them (rather than directly uploading them into the Course), they retain superior quality.
I too was not satisfied by the compression of images initially but switching to this method solved that.
It can also greatly reduce the file size of your course as it won’t directly contain the images themselves.
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What file format are you using for the image? jpeg or png?
jpg. But i’ve seen a similar post from someone else who tried both formats and it hadn’t made a difference. I mean ultimately the problem is with whatever the default compression algorithm is making the images blurry coz my original file is only a 100kb or so, so there really isnt a need to compress it.
I think i’ll go with @uniquenospacesshort 's suggestion for now and store the images on a gcp bucket and refence it via url, though i suspect to the end user that will look like the picture loads separately to the rest of the material (if that’s noticeable - let’s see).
Anecdotally, I think the picture loads more quickly when hosted externally as interactions between the course package and the LMS cause slowdown even if the images are included in some (compressed) manner within the ZIP file.
But, it could be prudent to do a side-by-side of load times to confirm this.
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the other option seems to set image size per device, the desktop version does appear clear if I upload the image again… but it means we have to assign the image 3 times, desktop, tablet and mobile, and then 3 times again if you choose to use the lightbox.
Well, PNG is a ‘lossless’ format so shouldn’t result in the same loss-of-quality that the JPEG compression system uses.
I’d like to bring this topic up again as my whole team is having to work around it quite often.
I think ultimately, it would be great for files under a certain size (say 5mb) that we can disable compression, because I am using PNG and if the size of the image is between 512 and 1024px wide then evolve compresses it and the compressed images is more often than not, blurry.
My work around, which I’ve shared with my team is to use the option I’ve mentioned above (‘set size per device’) or wherever possible, use small images (less that 512px) so that Evolve won’t compress it.
But really, I would love to see a feature were we can elect to disable the image being compressed or provide the option to only use the uncompressed image. I don’t mind if a file size limit is applied but the compression inbuilt into Evolve isn’t of the required quality.
@intrepid Hi – a good test here would be to take a hi-rez, high DPI image (Adobe Stock or other site), import it and see if the Evolve compression yields the same results. Image quality, size, compression, vector-or-bitmap… all of these things are considerations. As a screenshot, I’m guessing the original image was a bitmaps – if it was scaled or resized in any way, the original may be the issue. I don’t see where you said that original screenshot was OK. Was it clear when you snapped it?
Thanks for the response @Martin So here’s an example, I used snag it to capture your post, and I’ve pasted the original vs the compressed ‘small’ version. You can see that the 2nd image is blurry. I know the image is lower than the recommended width, but many times we don’t want/need to have a picture that is at least 1024px wide…This particular image is 855x129.
The original image size is only 48k, I feel there is really no need to compress that in this day and age. I understand that the image is being made smaller to fit mobile devices but if it’s blurry, it defeats the point.
@intrepid Makes sense. I’d defer to the Evolve team to comment on the compression criteria, but the compression may be related to responsive design or simply that the compression is applied equally to all images, regardless of size or resolution. If it could be done conditionally, that would be great, but may end up giving a course an inconsistent look.