[Task] Improve the quality of the team members' pictures ⭐

[tschaffter]

What product(s) is this story for?

OpenChallenges

As a user, I want

No response

Description

The existing images are pixelated. This could be because of the source images or because of Thumbor processing.

This issue was reported by Drew.

Acceptance criteria

No response

Tasks

• [ ] Identify why the images are pixelated
• [ ] Fix the images
• [ ] Let Drew know that the issue has been fixed

Anything else?

No response

Have you linked this story to a GitHub Project?

• [X] I have linked this story to a GitHub Project and set its metadata.

[rrchai]

Identify why the images are pixelated

Several factors might be contributing:

• Thumbor defaults to converting non-jpeg images to jpeg. This conversion process can alter the image size, although I am not sure how it works (bigger or smaller). During a test, a 460x460 png imag ("text_quality.png" in s3) was resized to 460x400 in jpeg format. Using jpeg images will maintain their original size because of no conversion occurred. This auto-conversion could be disabled by using the autojpg filter.
• By default, Thumbor compresses the image quality to 80% of its original value. To adjust this, use the quality filter.
• The source image might not have a great quality. If the current images were downloaded from social media, they could be already compressed once.

Fix the images

I can try to config Thumbor to turn off the autojpg conversion and maintain full image quality. However, I doubt this will yield noticeable improvement. A more effective solution I suggest is to ask team members to provide high (better) quality images. @tschaffter What do you think?

[tschaffter]

Random notes:

• We have AUTO_PNG_TO_JPG=True in Thumbor's .env, see .env.example
• We could ultimately let the user decide on the format, e.g. webp (best ratio quality-file size), png/jpg (required for search engine optimization)
• We should probably not change the format of the image a few days before the official launch.
• Please ask team members to submit high-quality images if needed. A minimum width and height in pixel should be requested.
• We will spend a few story points after the official launch to come up with a more robust solution.