Something should be done about BMP attachments

[Zaflis]

The current situation where we have to download BMP's on computer to view them is very annoying. If people want to show pixel lossless images they use PNG. The way i see it there are a few options:

 

1) Disallow BMP format from attachments. Very minor downside is that people will actually have to take the effort to learn converting image formats. But there's no excuse not to know how this is done, google is bloated with guides and the conversion itself should only take about 10-20 seconds of your time.

 

2) Allow uploading but site would convert them to PNG or JPG. (You can leave PNG conversion to uploader himself if PNG is so much harder.) Minor downside is that this takes server resources. Currently it only takes space and bandwidth, now it would take bandwidth and a bit more CPU time instead of space. But we would be able to preview them on site.

 

But i would recommend option 1 because good latency and performance seem to be more important factors here. Open a megathread for problems of converting BMP files if it becomes a frequent problem and link to that when user attempts to upload a bmp (in an error popup?).

super_important_pic.bmp

[worik]

Option 1 would be very useful and agreeable with my stomach ✅

Option 2 would be useful, too. BUT if it comes with the price of measurable performance loss for everybody, I vote against it. 

[KoolHndLuke]

3 hours ago, Zaflis said:

Disallow BMP format from attachments. Very minor downside is that people will actually have to take the effort to learn converting image formats. But there's no excuse not to know how this is done, google is bloated with guides and the conversion itself should only take about 10-20 seconds of your time.

And it would take them all of ten seconds to convert them in Paint- if even that. For anyone that doesn't understand the difference,

 

"BMP is a simple, uncompressed image format. In its most common form, it has a 54 byte header giving the image dimensions. This is followed by 3 bytes per pixel (red, green, blue) scanning horizontally starting at the bottom left. BMP also defines some other modes, which almost nobody uses in practice."

 

"JPEG is a compressed image format. It is lossy, which means that when you convert BMP to JPEG and back, the pixel values are slightly off. This allows for much better compression at the cost of some image quality. A JPEG image can be compressed to about 1% to 5% of the size of a BMP file before the difference becomes noticeable."

 

"Most of the images you see on the internet are in JPEG format. The format is best suited for photographs. The quality loss is more noticeable for computer generated images with sharp boundaries, such as text or screenshots. For these type of images, lossless compression such as PNG is the preferred format. However, PNG does not compress as well as JPEG."- from Matt Mahoney on Quora

 

I recently needed to free up space on my hard drive and I couldn't figure out what was using so much space. It was all the bmp screenshots I had in my game files! I converted the ones I wanted to keep and deleted the rest, freeing up at least 20 gigs of space.

[worik]

45 minutes ago, KoolHndLuke said:

I converted the ones I wanted to keep and deleted the rest, freeing up at least 20 gigs of space.

slightly related .. https://www.loverslab.com/topic/112416-poll-what-is-the-size-of-your-skyrim-ish-screenshot-collection/

It's just 16 samples right now, but is a reference.

[MadMansGun]

the funny thing about BMP is that it compresses better into 7z files, i once tried converting my install guide to jpg but when it was packed into a 7z the jpg version ended up having a larger file size.

[Dallas-Arbiter]

First world problems.