Image quality: Google Photos vs Flickr (and others?)

[sluggy_warrior]

I've been using Google Photos to share my photos, mostly because of its easy GUI and unlimited storage. While I understand that GPhotos re-compress the pics to a lower quality (unless I choose to store original which would count toward my quota), I've noticed that the image quality has been degrading badly lately.

While Flickr's future is uncertain, especially after being acquired recently by Verizon/SmugMug, they've been pretty good at focusing on photography. Thus, I'm switching slowly to uploading to Flickr instead (blame the XF18-55 on X-T20 for being way sharper than my old Nikon D5500 with 18-140, made the difference between GPhotos and Flickr noticable). I don't think I'll hit the 1TB limit anytime soon.

Which photo-sharing sites are you using? Sorry, pls don't mention Facebook, I don't have an account there, and their image quality is the worst.

Here are two screenshots of the same random pic uploaded to GPhotos and Flickr in the same browser.

The image on GPhotos:

Loading…

photos.app.goo.gl

Google Photos

The image on Flickr:

https://flic.kr/p/26Km2zT

Flickr

 

[hawk15]

Used to love Flickr but now use Google Photos. Like the rest of Yahoo, Flickr seemed to fall behind the times, is buggy, and the UI seems stale. Only 1 zoom level?? Cumbersome editing options.

Flickr got rid of their desktop Uploadr around the same time GPhotos added auto-syncing upload programs.

I also like the auto processing GPhotos does, it even did some video editing and added music. Doing it myself could've easily taken a weekend as I'm rusty with the software. The AI did more than an adequate job.

GPhotos automated away much of the tedium of photography; my phone automatically backs up to it, dedicated camera and vids, once imported to the desktop, are automatically backed up via the desktop app. Editing features are responsive and auto-editing is helpful.

The 1TB storage limit is definitely an advantage for Flickr but I haven't seen much loss in the GPhotos compression. Your 2 photos look close enough to me; I peeped for more than a minute and couldn't really tell the difference.

 

[Ron Poelman]

which we already knew about. :-(
Other than that, not much in it.
Try repeating the test with a lot more pixels and some tougher colour.

--
Ron.
Volunteer, what could possibly go wrong ?

 

[Anthony1970]

I am a longtime Flickr/ smugsmug user, never had any problem with them, they serve my needs perfectly well.

As 99% of my time I use a smartphone, I can not see the differences to well

Also keep in mind DPR is doing something to your images as well.

 

[sluggy_warrior]

Your 2 photos look close enough to me; I peeped for more than a minute and couldn't really tell the difference.

Try Ctrl-clicking on "Original size" links below each screenshots to open them in new tabs, then use Ctrl-PgUp and Ctrl-PgDwn to quickly switch between those two tabs, or download them and view with your favorite viewer. Do you see the Flickr screenshot is way sharper?

How about let me crop them here, reset your browser's zoom level or it'll blur both images below.

Another thing that I've been wondering, when someone ask about a certain lens, somebody will chime in that it's not great, someone else will swear that it's the sharpest they ever have. Is this situation similar, that you and I are having different definitions of sharpness/good?




Cropped from Flickr screenshot




Cropped from GPhotos screenshot

 

[Anthony1970]

Your 2 photos look close enough to me; I peeped for more than a minute and couldn't really tell the difference.

Try Ctrl-clicking on "Original size" links below each screenshots to open them in new tabs, then use Ctrl-PgUp and Ctrl-PgDwn to quickly switch between those two tabs, or download them and view with your favorite viewer. Do you see the Flickr screenshot is way sharper?

How about let me crop them here, reset your browser's zoom level or it'll blur both images below.

Another thing that I've been wondering, when someone ask about a certain lens, somebody will chime in that it's not great, someone else will swear that it's the sharpest they ever have. Is this situation similar, that you and I are having different definitions of sharpness/good?

To my eyes the Flickr one is sharper, about lenses often you will see the discussion pops up because of perceived sharpness or rendered colour.

To many variables that influence the final image in this time and age.

Of course this is just my personal opinión and nothing more

 

[SilentMirror]

To my eyes the difference is not noticeable unless I pixel peep. I use google photos for my 6D and X100F images processed out of Lightroom.

https://www.phonearena.com/news/Google-Photos-High-quality-vs-Original-Whats-the-difference-and-should-you-care_id93938

You will find a detailed analysis on this page. I printed photos out of google photos as well and they looked awesome.

P.S. I am not pro photographer and the prints are just for casual viewing of family moments. It fits the bill.

 

[hawk15]

How about let me crop them here, reset your browser's zoom level or it'll blur both images below.

Your crops clearly show Flickr doing better BUT they look worse than the webpages. Perhaps your crops were compressed again? I'm not seeing the color noise on the sign that your Flickr crop has.

I'm saving in PNG to minimize screenshot loss (or was PNG lossless, I don't remember).


Flickr


GPhoto, zoomed to approximate Flickr zoom-in size

These looks really close to me.

 

[AmbleYonder]

Your 2 photos look close enough to me; I peeped for more than a minute and couldn't really tell the difference.

Try Ctrl-clicking on "Original size" links below each screenshots to open them in new tabs, then use Ctrl-PgUp and Ctrl-PgDwn to quickly switch between those two tabs, or download them and view with your favorite viewer. Do you see the Flickr screenshot is way sharper?

that is because Flickr uses a more aggressive sharpening algorithm.

so which is sharp and which is oversharp based on your original edit?

 

[sluggy_warrior]

As a web developer, I thought I should contribute better to the community than just pixel peeping and whining Here's what I found so far.

My original file: 5944x3685 with filesize of 3.3MB

Flickr's "download original" has same filesize and even same md5 hash as the original file from me. So Flickr can be a lossless backup of your photos (up to 1TB for free).

GPhotos's "download" is slightly smaller: 5080x3149 with filesize of 1.3MB. I resized my original file to 5080x3149, paste it as a new layer in GIMP in "difference" mode and can barely see the differences (almost completely black). Google seems to nail it in term of storage efficiency while not sacrificing IQ. Slightly lower resolution of my original file, but almost no visual degradation, considered as a good backup given unlimited storage and easy sync across devices.

Thus, the problem we've been seeing is likely just the in-browser viewing, let's dive into that. Inspecting the displayed images on Flickr and GPhotos that fill the browser at 1920x1080 screen resolution:

Flickr view size: 1600x992, 315KB
GPhotos view size: 1584x982, 282KB

It seems to me that for different screen resolutions and browser size, Flickr pregenerates the viewing image at certain presets, 1600px wide in this case (and 2048px when zoomed in). Whereas GPhotos generates the requested resolution dynamically. For example, if you inspect the image displayed by GPhotos, its URL is:

https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/<... bunch of codes ...>_w=w1584-h982-no

You can guest it, the last two numbers in the URL indicate the box where the generated image will fit in, so I changed it to "_w=w1600-h992-no" and instantly get an image of the same size as viewed in Flickr.

I'm including four images below for your inspection:

- my original image resized to 1600x992 in GIMP (using Lanczos3)

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drive.google.com

- the Flickr for-view image at 1600x992

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drive.google.com

- the GPhotos for-view image at 1600x992

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drive.google.com

- the GPhotos for-view image at 1584x982

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drive.google.com

Two things I noticed from the images above:

1. for GPhotos, the image at 1600 is almost as good as the Flickr's 1600 image, and both are significantly sharper than the GPhoto's image at 1584. This is the main source of the problem we've been seeing, maybe the test-driven development at Google doesn't work in this case where only manual inspection/testing can catch it. I think they either need to tweak their on-the-fly image generation so that the output is good at any requested resolution, or go the route of Flickr with generating the closest good preset/resolution and let the browser scales it down slightly.

2. even comparing the three 1600px images, I don't see any sharpening in Flickr's image, but their resizing software is so good. For example, inspecting the four power lines across the sky, Flick's image show smooth lines whereas GPhotos and GIMP outputs are quite jagged.

So, from my perspective as a developer, I salute the Google engineers for dynamically generating the image at any resolution on the fly, that's so cool, but it's useless. I'd praise the Flickr engineers for analyzing and testing thoroughly, and settling on the best compromise.

 

[sybersitizen]

Another thing that I've been wondering, when someone ask about a certain lens, somebody will chime in that it's not great, someone else will swear that it's the sharpest they ever have. Is this situation similar, that you and I are having different definitions of sharpness/good?

The situation is that there's much variation among different specimens of a lens, and among the expectations of different lens users.

 

[Horoscope Fish]

I use Flickr.

That doesn't mean I love it.