Flickr Photo Resizing

Well I was planning on uploading larger images to use on the site, and let filckr automatically resize everything but the decision seems to have been a little premature. The photo resizing feature on flickr is terrible in terms of file sizes. The quality seems pretty good, and the resized image even seems to be a little sharpened, but one would expect file sizes to go down at least a little bit. Wrong!

Case 1

A picture of Gary Bettman with the following dimensions: 640×479 pixels resized to 500×374 pixels. The result is a 18% increase in file size, that’s right, a smaller image has a larger file size…

Case 2

A picture of my cell phone (Nokia N91) with the following dimensions: 1000×1000 pixels resized to 500×500 pixels. The result is a mere 12% decrease in file size, even though the dimensions were cut by half.

Now I tried the same thing using Photoshop CS, and the resizing function cut file sizes drastically better than flickr. In terms of case 1, while flickr increased the file size by 18%, Photoshop decreased the file size by over 50%. I guess this is a pretty good feature of flickr if you want to get the sharpest shots, but not the best choice in terms of functionality if you’re planning on displaying the images on your own web page.