Hacker News Reader

Comment by bobmcnamara | Hacker News Reader

I made a 64kx64k JPEG once by feeding the encoder the same line of macro blocks until it produce the entire image.

Years later I was finally able to open it.

I had a ton of trouble opening a 10MB or so png a few weeks back. It was stitched together screenshots forming a map of some areas in a game, so it was quite large. Some stuff refused to open it at all as if the file was invalid, some would hang for minutes, some opened blurry. My first semi-success was Fossify Gallery on my phone from F-Droid. If I let it chug a bit, it'd show a blurry image, a while longer it'd focus. Then I'd try to zoom or pan and it'd blur for ages again. I guess it was aggressively lazy-loading. What worked in the end was GIMP. I had the thought that the image was probably made in an editor, so surely an editor could open it. The catch is that it took like 8GB of RAM, but then I could see clearly, zoom, and pan all I wanted. It made me wonder why there's not an image viewer that's just the viewer part of GIMP or something.

Among things that didn't work were qutebrowser, icecat, nsxiv, feh, imv, mpv. I did worry at first the file was corrupt, I was redownloading it, comparing hashes with a friend, etc. Makes for an interesting benchmark, I guess.

For others curious, here's the file: https://0x0.st/82Ap.png

I'd say just curl/wget it, don't expect it to load in a browser.

That's a 36,000x20,000 PNG, 720 megapixels. Many decoders explicitly limit the maximum image area they'll handle, under the reasonable assumption that it will exceed available RAM and take too long, and assume the file was crafted maliciously or by mistake.

Safari on my MacBook Air opened it fine, though it took about four seconds. Zooming works fine as well. It does take ~3GB of memory according to Activity Monitor.

IrfanView was able to load it in about 8 seconds (Ryzen 7 5800x) using 2.8GB of RAM, but zooming/panning is quite slow (~500ms per action)

IrfanView on my PC is very fast. Zoomed to 100% I can pan around no problem. Is it using CPU or GPU? I've got an 11900K CPU and RTX 3090.

There's fast and slow resample viewing options in Irfanview, he may have slow turned on for higher quality.

For what it's worth, this loaded (slowly) in Firefox on Windows for me (but zooming was blurry), and the default Photos viewer opened it no problem with smooth zooming and panning.

I use honey view for reading comics etc. It can handle this.

Old school acdsee would have been fine too.

I think it's all the pixel processing on the modern image viewers (or they're just using system web views that isn't 100% just a straight render).

I suspect that the more native renderers are doing some extra magic here. Or just being significantly more OK with using up all your ram.

It loads in about 10 seconds in Safari on an M1 Air. I think I am spoiled.

It loaded after 10-15 seconds on myiPad Pro M1, although it did start reloading after I looked around in it.

Interestingly enough, it loads in about 5 seconds on my Pixel 6a.

On Firefox on Android on my pretty old phone, a blurry preview rendered in about 10 seconds, and it was fully rendered in 20 something seconds. Smooth panning and zooming the entire time

Firefox on a Samsung S23 Ultra did it a few seconds faster but otherwise the same experience

Following up with Firefox on S24 Ultra loaded from blank to image in a second and then could zoom right in fine with no blurriness or stuttering at all!

It loads in about 5 seconds on an iPhone 12 using safari.

It also pans and zooms swiftly

How strange, took at least 30s to load on my iPhone 12 Pro Max with Safari but it was smooth to pan and zoom after. Which is way better than my 16 core 64GB RAM Windows machine where both Chrome and Edge gave up very quickly, with a "broken thumbnail" icon.

Probably because they're based on the same engine.

The strangeness was that 2 iPhones from the same generation would exhibit such different performance behaviors, and in parallel the irony that a desktop browser (engine irrelevant) on a device with cutting edge performance can't do what a phone does.

Same, right up until I zoomed in and waited for Safari to produce a higher resolution render.

Partially zoomed in was fine, but zooming to maximum fidelity resulted in the tab crashing (it was completely responsive until the crash). Looks like Safari does some pretty smart progressive rendering, but forcing it to render the image at full resolution (by zooming in) causes the render to get OOMed or similar.

I remember that years ago (mobile) Safari would aggressively use GPU layers and crash if you ran out of GPU memory. Maybe that's still happening?

Preview on a mac handles the file fine.

Firefox on a mid-tier Samsung and a cheapo data connection (4G) took avout 30s to load. I could pan, but it limited me from zooming much, and the little I could zoom in looked quite blury.

ImgurViewer from fdroid on an FP5 opened it blurry after around 5s and 5s later it was rendered completely.

Pan&zoom works instantly with a blurry preview and then takes another 5-10s to render completely.

PDF files with included vector-based layers, e.g. plans or maps of large area, are also quite difficult to render/open.

Just today collegue was looking at some air traffic permit map within PDF that was like 12MB or something around that. Complained about Adobe Reader changing something so he cannot pan/zoom no more.

I suggested to try the HN beloved Sumatra PDF. Ugh, it couldn't cope with it normally. Chrome did it better coped better.

Safari on iPhone did a good job with it actually lol

Loading this on my iPhone on 1gbit took about 5s and I can easily pan and zoom. A desktop should handle it beautifully.

Oh hey it's the thing that ruins an otherwise okay rhythm game.

Opens fine in Firefox 138.

on mobile Brave just displayed it as the placeholder broken link image but in Firefox it loaded in about 10s

On my Waterfox 6.5.6, it opened but remained blurry when zoomed in. MS Paint refused to open it. The GIMP v2.99.18 crashed and took my display driver with it. Windows 10 Photo Viewer surprisingly managed to open it and keep it sharp when zoomed in. The GIMP v3.0.2 (latest version at the time of writing) crashed.

> don't expect it to load in a browser

Takes a few seconds, but otherwise seems pretty ok in desktop Safari. Preview.app also handles it fine (albeit does allocate an extra ~1-2GB of RAM)

I get a Your connection was interrupted on Chrome.

Loads fine and fairly quickly on a Macbook Pro M3 Pro with Firefox 137. Does have a bit of delay when initially zooming in, but pans and zooms fine after.

qView opens this easily enough.

Works fine on my 5 year old iPad Pro with an A12 processor.

I once encoded an entire TV OP into a multi-megabyte animated cursor (.ani) file.

Surprisingly, Windows 95 didn't die trying to load it, but quite a lot of operations in the system took noticeably longer than they normally did.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com