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Comment by pasbesoin | Hacker News Reader

Pandora: Is there a reason the image on this blog post is so large? This one image, resized in the browser to 300x200, is consuming 2+ MB.

Namely, this one:

    <img alt="tim-map.jpg" src="http://blog.pandora.com/pandora/tim-map.jpg" width="300" height="200" class="mt-image-right" style="float: right; margin: 0 0 20px 20px;" />

I've been noticing the resurgence of browser-based resizing of large images on a few different business blogs/formats, recently. In this case (and some others), the resize is to much less than 1/4 the original, so I'm thinking it's not a "Retina" thing.

Maybe it's just convenience for the company/blogger, not bothering to resize. But then, every access is a 2+ MB hit -- which is how I noticed it -- both for you, and for the viewer, which may particularly impact mobile viewers and others on limited bandwidth connections.

View on HN

This happens all the time, all over the web. It's because interns or non-webdev staff often don't know they should resize a file before uploading it and attaching it to a post. So they'll upload a JPG right from a camera's memory card and use the WYSIWYG editor to set its dimensions. The worst are when images like this are referenced within broadcast e-mail messages. Luckily you can swap the file out on disk without inconveniencing future readers.

I wrote an image API at my place of work to take a file by name and accept dimensions in the query string. It resizes the image, caches the file on disk, at and serves the smaller file. However, it's tough to integrate that API with every little WYSIWYG editor we have, so sometimes we still serve up large files in this way.

Usually, intentional retina-quality images have plenty of telltale signs (like the @2x naming convention).

don't know they should resize a file before uploading it and attaching it to a post

That's a job for a computer, not a human. It's a waste of an editor's time to dwell on such details, just as it's a waste of a newspaper editor's time to worry about the ink in the printing machines.

Googles mod_pagespeed for Apache does dynamic resizing of images.

Any real evidence that interns are any worse than full-time employees?

They're easier to get rid of, for a start, and that makes it harder to establish firm relationships and long-term projects.

Seriously not impressed by the generalization that interns are the ones responsible for "making the web a terrible place." So as soon as that same developer takes a position as a full-timer they're magically imbued with all the best practices and knowledge required to run a great website?

Also, you just admitted that your own place of work serves large images. Let's not throw blame around that we're not willing to take ourselves.

You're right, generalizations are not impressive.

> you just admitted that your own place of work serves large images. Let's not throw blame around that we're not willing to take ourselves.

Yes, it happens at my place of work, and that is where my generalization came from. I intended to indicate that even when taking steps to mitigate the issue, it still crops up because it's a hard problem to fix. Eventually, work gets delegated to people that don't know everything they should. It is not a big deal as long as people are learning from it.

It happens when we assign web tasks to interns "and non-webdev staff" without proper education/training. So if you follow Toyota's "five whys" rule, it is not the interns' fault at all.

They are probably just not familiar with bandwidth costs... wait...

Probably an oversight. I usually surf on 30+ mbps connections, so if I were testing a site I wouldn't notice it.

It's a bit different when your job is to make a website.

But blogs are often run by marketing interns who usually don't care or know any better any bandwidth.

Or marketing executives with the same lack of concern.

You see this problem a lot when reading via a feed reader. Images end up huge because the style sheet that resizes them isn't in effect.

There might be an overall QA problem here: anyone else noticed vocational spelled with an extra a?

or a missing space... "a vocation"

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