[Cyclopath]

I'm writing from work. I do not have a 4k display, I have a pair of 1920x1080 monitors. And I'm using Firefox. On my screen the first image looks better. It's a little overly sharpened but the second one is too soft and in need of sharpening. I'm sure it looks better at full size but it's being downsampled, probably by the browser, and the result isn't as good as shrinking then sharpening in Photoshop. For me the first image is being displayed at its intended size and that's why it looks better.

[Riverside Laker]

Let us know if you find a tool that can scale the image size. I have the same problem on a web page. I don't want to make the effort to store small, medium, and large images. It seems that the server could automate this.

[Tom]

You can use imagemagick. It's installed on most servers. That's what we use for generating thumbnails but can resize pretty much any image to any size. http://www.imagemagick.org/script/index.php Or you can just use google photos to host the original and have them resize for you on the fly via the =s parameter: https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/fa9PW0Td_QaBudUtctmoT67L2yhISBWSnMppPHbyzkJUcnPBnqbzXz2m1w_ypnG0jlMV6XVAsA9Vmw=s800 (800 wide) https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/fa9PW0Td_QaBudUtctmoT67L2yhISBWSnMppPHbyzkJUcnPBnqbzXz2m1w_ypnG0jlMV6XVAsA9Vmw=s1600 (1600 wide) https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/fa9PW0Td_QaBudUtctmoT67L2yhISBWSnMppPHbyzkJUcnPBnqbzXz2m1w_ypnG0jlMV6XVAsA9Vmw=s0 (original)

[Bedivere]

The comments, and the problem are interesting. I have a Dell U2410 24" IPS monitor which is being driven by an NVidia GTX950 video card at 1920x1200 resolution in a traditional desktop/tower computer. This is the machine I do all my photo processing on. The monitor has been calibrated with a Spyder 4 color calibrator. I'm running Win7 and Firefox for my web browsing. I don't see huge differences between the two pictures at a casual glance but pixelation does pop out with even a cursory inspection in the first image. The fine ribbing in the rocks in the upper center portion of the picture is the most drastically obvious difference with the upper picture clearly showing that it's lower resolution. The heather and grass at the bottom center is less detailed and more "blotchy" in the first image and the hiker is much less detailed. I also see what I would call compression artifacting along the sky/mountain interface that presents as a 1-2 pixel wide strip of paler sky right where the sky touches the mountains. The second image just looks a lot better on my machine when you start inspecting it closely. As for how this site handles images, I don't think I'd change a thing. I like the thumbnail previews that you can click on if you want to see the native resolution image, or at least a larger version. I'll probably upgrade to a 4K monitor someday, but for now I can see no reason to. Good 'ol HD 1920x1080 looks just fine on a 24" display.

[iron]

first picture looks better to me by a mile. the second one looks way too soft. didn't zoom.

[Tom]

I think the reason some of you are seeing a significant difference is you are viewing the second picture on a monitor that isn't ultra high resolution. I just went back to my 1x resolution monitor and the first image looks sharp and the second picture looks soft. The comparison is only valid if you are viewing the second picture on a high resolution monitor (retina, 4K, etc.) that has been scaled ~200-300% unless perhaps your graphics card can handle the extra pixels. If not, the second picture will look soft because the pixels are too small in the second image for your monitor to render them. In practice you would only serve up the second image to monitors capable of rendering the smaller pixels. Anyway, this has convinced me it's silly to serve high resolution thumbnails to retina and 4K displays. Any minimal benefit isn't worth the file size tradeoff.