Flickr Increases Compression on Photos Without Telling Anyone

Flickr decided to change its image compression system for all thumbnails without properly announcing it to users, and it led to some gripes from its more attentive members.

The whole affair started when some users complained on the Flickr forums about a lowering of quality for their uploaded photos.

This led photography blog PetaPixel to carry out an in-depth investigation of the whole situation, which yielded some interesting results.

First off, some basic facts: when you upload a photo to Flickr, the service, besides saving the original on its servers, also creates additional thumbnails at various resolutions.

PetaPixel's approach was to take one of their previous photos uploaded to Flickr a few years back and reupload it today, with Flickr's current service parameters.

While it was true that there was a lower quality for all thumbnails, the original photo was identical to the one uploaded a few years back.

New compression setting doesn't affect original image files

The changes made to the algorithm seemed to alter only lower-quality thumbs, sometimes cutting down their file size up to 50%, which was obviously the entire purpose of changing this setting in the first place.

Since Flickr stores the originals as they were and still offers 1TB of free storage to all users regardless of account type and second only to Google Photos' unlimited storage offering, this doesn't seem to be bothering too many of its users, most of which haven't even noticed the change.

So unless you're using Flickr to host your photography portfolio, or you're pulling-in image thumbs directly from their servers, you might just not care, since all your photos at their original resolutions are still intact.

Flickr's response to the PetaPixel investigation was as follows: "Flickr does not compress originals. If you download your originals, the files you receive will be bit-for-bit identical. Like most photo apps, we create several sizes of thumbnail images for the purpose of showing images quickly on the web and in the mobile apps."