With the low Steem prices and high expenses, Steemit Inc. is almost broke and they are cutting costs wherever possible. Steemitimages is a centralised image uploading service provided by Steemit Inc. When you upload images on steemit.com or for example through the beem.imageuploader in the beem Python library by , they get hosted for free by Steemit Inc. on fast Amazon S3 storage. Awesome, huh?
I used to love steemitimages: I always export my photos from Lightroom with a width of 1920px and JPEG compression level of 70, this guarantees that my photographs can be viewed at full HD resolution without compromising on quality. Steemitimages did not mess much with my photos and only compressed them a little more to save a few KB which was not visible. I will turn my website (https://julianpetersphotography.de/) that is currently powered by Wordpress into a Steem dApp soon where my photos will be displayed at 1920px as well, so having high-resolution photos in my Steem posts is important to me.
After wrote on the TravelFeed Discord today that his photos on steemit.com suddenly looked blurry, I looked into it. This is a photo that I posted two weeks ago how it used to be hosted on Steemitimages (left) and how it is now (right):
Even when not viewed full-screen but in a post, the photo looks clearly blurry with heavy compression artefacts. I understand that Steemit Inc. is trying to save money and obviously 83 KB are a lot cheaper to host than 581 KB - but they can't be serious about downsizing all our images including pictures uploaded in the past to 640px!
So has Steemitimages destroyed all our images?
Luckily, the answer is no! If you open a picture embedded in a post on steemit.com in a new tab, you will find ?format=match&mode=fit&width=640 at the end of the url. If you change this to ?format=match&mode=fit, you will get a much better resolution and quality. Other frontends such as still display the larger resolution, so the same photos will appear much sharper when the post is viewed on Steempeak instead of Steemit. The same applies to any images, no matter if they were uploaded through Steemitimages or a dApp such as
or eSteem that host the larger version themselves: On steemit.com, only the heavily compressed and downsized version will be displayed.
This is just another reason to use alternative frontends instead of Steemit, but since this means that the large version is still hosted by steemitimages, the question remains why steemit.com now shows the downsized version and if Steemit Inc. plans to delete the larger versions eventually. To be on the safe side, I recommend switching from steemit.com to another dApp and upload images using their image uploader such as (centralised) or
(IPFS) instead of relying on steemitimages - and for viewing posts, they are much better as well since photos will not appear unsharp and blurry as on Steemit!
My Recent Posts
By the time you read this, this post or some of the posts below may be older than 7 days so you can not vote for them anymore. If you want to support me, please consider voting on one my recent daily posts!
- Urbex: Exploring Taiwan's UFO Village - Part 3
- Urbex: Exploring Taiwan's UFO Village - Part 2
- Urbex: Exploring Taiwan's UFO Village - Part 1
- Market Friday in Aungban, Myanmar
- How Fake News killed Bubble Tea in Germany
- Urbex in Yangon's Abandoned Amusement Park: Part 3
- Urbex in Yangon's Abandoned Amusement Park: Part 1
You can view all my posts on steemitworldmap.com
Please Follow, Upvote and Resteem
If you like my content, don't forget to upvote this post and follow me for more photos and travel stories! Also, I will be happy if you leave a comment to tell me your thoughts and resteem this post to share my work!
All my photos are also available for licensing, please contact me through my Website or the Steemit Traveller's Discord