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In this Maths Meta SE thread, I noticed that the image linked in my answer was blurry, even though it was being scaled down to a lower resolution. For comparison, check out the images below:

enter image description here enter image description here

The left image is the original image, and the right image is the scaled image, where both images are scaled down to medium (320x320 pixel resolution of thumbnail).

I've also tried using HTML to resize the images, but the Imgur image didn't show up that time, so I can't check how that affects it.

Why is this happening to my images? Is the compression happening on Imgur's servers or the SE servers?

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2 Answers 2

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The compression is done on imgur's side, but since it's treated as a graphic image, not as SVG, it can't possibly retain the text quality when compressing high-resolution screenshots.

To preserve the quality, lower the screenshot resolution on your device, each device has its own way, but I'm pretty sure it's doable on all modern mobile devices.

In case you take the screenshot on a PC, you'll have to lower the screen resolution itself.

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    "it can't possibly retain the text quality when compressing high resolution screenshots" of course it's possible, the question demonstrates this by posting a less blurry scaled-down version of the original image.
    – Ryan M
    Dec 23, 2020 at 12:02
  • @RyanM the images in the question appear to be screenshots of the scaled screenshots, not original so of course the quality will be terrible. The original can be found only here, OP did not link to it anywhere. It's a huge 2046x1280 image, which means x4 ratio than what we see here.
    – Shadow Wizard Says No More War
    Dec 23, 2020 at 12:08
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    Yep, the images in the posts are not the originals. What actually happened was that I zoomed the screen in quite a bit and then took the screenshot. I was thinking this would increase the image quality, but I didn't expect it to have that much of an effect.
    – Toby Mak
    Dec 23, 2020 at 12:10
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    Ah, I see. For comparison, here is the original from your link, scaled down to 320x200 in MS Paint. It's arguably less blurry than the original scaled-down version, but that might just be a stylistic choice with the scaling algorithm.
    – Ryan M
    Dec 23, 2020 at 12:15
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As U11-Forward has mentioned, the file size is too big. If I use a different image which has a smaller file size, the problem disappears.

enter image description here enter image description here

In the two images above, there is no obvious loss of resolution.

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    No, that's a photo, not a screenshot as in your question. I think the difference lies there.
    – Glorfindel Mod
    Dec 23, 2020 at 11:32
  • Here's a screenshot of that, simply uploaded without modification and turned into a comment - looks very sharp and uncompressed to me. It's 1440x2560 and a 1.5MB jpeg.
    – Rob
    Dec 23, 2020 at 13:53
  • It's probably a combination of the original screenshot having text, which becomes more noticeably blurry when it's scaled down, and the fact that the screenshot with text is a larger file size (which correlates with Shadow's comment about the screenshot having a higher resolution.)
    – Cave Johnson
    May 22, 2021 at 16:54

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