This blog was created in October 2020 as a home for all of my writing and photography which doesn’t naturally belong on Green Path, my long-running environment and wildlife blog. Older posts here were carried across from my previous (iinet) website under their original dates.
Blog – words & images
Image sizing in WordPress
I love my photos and I want them to appear to their best advantage but there’s a cost in download speed and bandwidth. Here I compare the quality of images re-sized in several different ways.
Scaling
Displaying
WordPress re-sizes all images on the fly to suit browser window size and zoom, so any image set to “display at 750px” or “display at full size” doesn’t actually do that – even at default zoom and a browser window that’s bigger than default window size.
At those settings, in fact, an image nominally displayed at 750px is actually displayed at about 650px; a 1500px image nominally displayed at full size is actually displayed at about 1100px, and in fact I couldn’t make it display any bigger than that at any zoom level or screen size.
It’s all a bit crazy, and I’m inclined to believe that most of these settings are relics of previous WP iterations and any effect on image quality can now be ignored, since even the header image is never (well, hardly ever) displayed at its nominally “preferred” size of 1200px but, given plenty of window space, at 1310px.
An image scaled in WP is a substantially smaller, faster-loading, file than the same image scaled before uploading (with my current app, at least) but they are indistinguishable on screen. Which is good, actually, since the quality is very nearly as good as the original photo file.
Cropping
And an image cropped in WP is similarly indistinguishable from the same image scaled before uploading but it is similarly a much smaller, faster-loading, file.
Interestingly, the media library per se shows the original version (although its URL link is to the scaled or cropped version) but the “Add media” dialogue shows the altered version.
Cropping a scaled version, as here, begins to visibly degrade image quality.
And the image is…
My sample image shows a spider I found at White Mountains NP a month ago. Landscapes from that walk are on Green Path but the spider itself is on iNaturalist.
Afterword: Other compression apps
Searching the WP plugin library for “image optimisation” brings up half a dozen options, many of them free or “freemium” (i.e., introductory level is free, full version isn’t). Alternatively, www.vandelaydesign.com/image-optimization/ lists and compares ten different image optimisers. Several of them are available as WP plug-ins, several are free, some are both.
After writing and publishing this post I installed ShortPixel and used it to down-size all of the images on this blog (i.e. Words & Images, but not Green Path) except for my demonstration images above. This page, somewhat ironically, will now be the slowest to load of any post on the blog.
The triple whammy of an ageing boomer cohort
The original title of this think-piece was longer and more informative: The triple whammy of an ageing boomer cohort and the need for generational change in voluntary societies
My starting point was observing, over the last ten years or more, wildly diverse clubs experiencing similar problems without realising that their problems are, in fact, generational and therefore common.
I will talk about “voluntary groups” but the term should be interpreted very broadly: my comments apply, more or less, to all unpaid activity outside the home: to amateur orchestras, tennis clubs, gardening clubs and Amnesty groups alike. And my “voluntary workforce” covers tuckshop helpers, NGO committee members, Op-shop volunteers, and everyone else who contributes unpaid hours to the community. Continue reading “The triple whammy of an ageing boomer cohort”
Recent additions
A small flurry of recent additions to this blog:
- The Art of Funerary Violin was a brilliant spoof and I have republished my review of it in the hope of introducing more readers to it. I’ve added a link to its creator’s website, too, because he has kept on doing smart, funny projects.
- Journey towards a path, Metaphysics from a clean slate and Established religions. These three are considerably longer and more serious, peering into the foundations of philosophy and religion and finding much which deserves critical attention.
They all date back to 2007 – 08 and have been posted here under approximately the dates they were written., i.e., way down towards the bottom of the blog, which is why this note seemed worth writing.
Just by way of an afterthought: I wonder whether I would have been quite so keen to republish Journey and its sequels if we hadn’t just suffered through Morrison’s failed attempt to legislate extra privileges for religious groups.
Words at play
Analogue : Digital
If we wander into any art gallery which shows a variety of work we are likely to see pictures identified as “digital images”, but the term is problematic. An “image” is something we see, but in what ways can an image be “digital”? And what, really, is the artwork?
Analogue vs digital
Technically, digital is contrasted with analogue. Analogue changes in any quantity are continuous, i.e. smooth at every scale, while digital changes are discrete, stepwise. For instance, the minute hand of an analogue clock moves smoothly and its position can be read to any desired accuracy, while a digital clock will say the time is (e.g.) 8.22 p.m until it says 8.23 p.m.