perceptualcompression
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Flickr's new image compression was almost invisible, until it wasn't
Ugh, it's all pixelated. Ugh, artifacts. Compression is otherwise a pretty useful trick for squeezing more stuff (photos, video and more) into less space, but something typically gets lost in the process. Sometimes it's indistinguishable, other times it screams at your eyes, offending your gentle sensibilities -- or something. Usually, however, it's somewhere in the middle, which was Flickr's problem. The photo service offers users 1TB of free storage at original resolution -- which is still good going, but users started to notice a change in compression used for the various image sizes it also offers: smaller files but bigger issues with artifacts and details lost. That said, Flickr made the changes in late 2014, but it wasn't until much more recently (alongside a recent redesign) that eagle-eyed users began to notice that something had changed.
