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Working a lot with images I was coming across some curiosities concerning how web sites deal with pictures and especially the uploading of pictures.
In social network sites like Twitter or Facebook the user can upload images either for his profile picture, a custom background image or photo albums. The file size is always limited which of course makes sense.
But what doesn’t really make sense is that any resolution is allowed.
Now, this may sound weird since it seems to be widely believed that the resolution of an image is somehow proportional to its size, for example when you look at a jpg image. But you can create pointlessly high resolution jpg images which are very small in their byte size. And here we are at the curiousity: in the top social network sites you cannot upload images with a very high resolution although their size is very small.
The really sloppy part about that is that none of the sites seems to expect something like that.
I just provoked the Fail Wale to appear on my screen today, trying to upload a crazy high resolution picture which just had 500 kB for my background. In Facebook I couldn’t even press cancel anymore, everything just froze.
I think, what I find more surprising (and actually very dissapointing) is not the issue with resolution. It’s the fact how this little example reveals sloppy web development.
I can only say: In web development you have to consider and handle every case. Amen.
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