Poor image quality with Picasa Uploader for Mac
The sheer convenience of being able to upload directly from iPhoto means that many of my photographs from 2009 have gone to Picasa web albums instead of this website. However during a recent upload I noticed that during the process the photographs were being overly sharpened which had the effect of creating ugly artefacts on buildings with intricate decoration (e.g. churches). The odd thing is that if you upload jpgs one at a time via the web interface, this did not happen.
Looking back to some photographs from earlier in the year you can see this else where. For example compare this photo of Rosie at the top of a cold and windy church tower to the Picasa version below.
Rosie at the top of the Rye Church tower.
Rye from the church tower (Picasa version)
Picasa was convenient but perhaps it is time to return to hosting my own photographs?
December 30th, 2009 at 11:55 pm
[Cross-posting this from the Facebook comment thread]
The same image uploaded via the Facebook for iPhoto uploader is: http://photos-d.ak.fbcdn.net/hphotos-ak-snc3/hs141.snc3/16854_376295960023_698610023_10263872_215820_n.jpg
There are no artefacts but the largest size is 604px which is really small on modern monitors.
Here’s the same image on flickr: http://farm5.static.flickr.com/4046/4229027949_aa87ccf1be_o.jpg
And, I’ve just realised that the newer version of iPhoto comes with a built in flickr uploader. This would allow me to retain the convenience I have at the moment.
December 31st, 2009 at 1:31 am
Ugh. Thanks for the heads up. Now that I look at my photos again, I think Picasa for Windows is doing the same (though perhaps to a less severe degree).
February 13th, 2010 at 10:39 pm
Hi,
I’ve experienced the same problem. Exporting a photo from iPhoto (scaling to ‘large’) then uploading this manually to picasa, the result looks right:
http://picasaweb.google.com/marc.remijn/TestAlbum#5437848546076065602
Using the iPhoto picasa uploader and choosing ‘better quality’ the result looks like this:
http://picasaweb.google.com/marc.remijn/Sneeuwpret#5434486040585922002