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Comment by eps | Hacker News Reader

> All too often I’ve seen people encoding 8MP photos as PNGs

I’ve literally never seen anyone do that, leave alone this being done “often”.

So your experience invalidates mine? I have endlessly seen website media folders throughout my 14 year career filled with PNG photographs uploaded by unknowing content editors through a CMS. This isn’t their fault, they’re writers and know no better. CMS tools should be set up by the developers to automatically convert to the right format.

Cases on the flipside includes developers using JPEG for everything. 100KB highly artifacted illustrations used throughout web layouts, which would be infinitely better as clear 10KB PNGs.

No, it doesn't invalidate yours, but I'm with him. I've never seen that, either, and I cannot imagine how that could happen "often" (without doubting your experience).

Because cameras and phones give you JPEGs. The common user doesn't shoot RAW. I cannot see any not-highly-technical user convert JPEGs to anything else.

True, I've seen a lot on some clients CMSs. Classic case would be the ones uploading an screenshot of an image done on their Mac, which by default (as many OSes, anyway) outputs a PNG.

And are you sure they were all real PNGs? You know, displayed suffix means nearly nothing nowadays, you can serve JPEG image as ".png" file with "image/png" mime header and browser would not even raise its eyebrow and process the JPEG properly.

I occasionally archive some imagery from web and while viewing them in Irfan I am frequently confronted with "This image is JPG with .png extension, would you like to rename it?" prompt, without what I'd probably had no idea how frequently this discrepancy occurs.

You said

> All too often I’ve seen people encoding 8MP photos as PNGs...

And now apparently it's some CMS that was doing that... which doesn't make much sense either. Either way this is just such a patently and obviously dumb thing to do that it makes me doubt your experience is anywhere close to being statistically significant.

No, they said people were uploading PNGs to a CMS, not that the CMS was doing it.

When I see this it's usually someone getting an image from a stock image site. They provide PNG because they don't know how it's going to be used by the end user and the end user doesn't know enough to understand that's a problem so you get a 4MB background image as a PNG that could be 98% smaller without any great effort.

Don't know about 8MP.. but I have certainly been guilty of sticking photos up as PNG before, so it is good to be aware of the difference.

I’ve seen it plenty of times

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