Is it possible to preserve image quality when uploading images?

Question

Is it possible to preserve image quality when uploading images through Drupal7?

For example, I take this image: http://f.cl.ly/items/0L3j21030C3O2A3x2w0b/thumb.jpg

I upload it using an Imagefield, which has no min/max resolution set, and it looks like this: http://f.cl.ly/items/2B2q2a1H402T1Z1j3w2j/baboon-onesie-costume-thumb.jpeg

So already we're seeing a loss in quality. Then it's displayed using a view, which scales the image (which it should do IF) it's larger than 190x280 (which it isn't), and now it looks like: http://f.cl.ly/items/2n023q1Q331J3E2d3a3I/baboon-onesie-costume-thumb-1.jpeg

The quality difference is massive - there's a huge loss of colours and severe artefact creation around the image edges.

The GD image settings are JPEG quality: 100%.

Is there anything that can be done to prevent this ridiculous loss of quality?

Answer 1

There's two solutions to this. The easiest is:

• Upload images with a "jpeg" extension instead of a "jpg" extension. For whatever reason, images with a jpeg extension are not mangled by Drupal.

However, the best solution if you have control over your hosting environment is:

• Install the imagemagick module.

Answer 2

I had this problem, uploading an image to see it scaled via an imagestyle to a low quality image.

The problem was that within my contact type I had a max image resolution set, that I'd forgotten about.

Removed this from the site, and re uploaded, everything is good.

Answer 3

Under the display settings for content types image field you could set the format to none:original image And a CSS rule to display the image at the desired size

caveat
this probably would lead to problems as users could upload images with extreme max/min image resolutions.