I keep getting image is too complex to upload.

Question

I'm uploading an image and it fails:

Sorry, this image cannot be processed. It may be too large or complex. Please contact us for help.

I tried to make it smaller using Photoshop, so now only 2 MB (was 8MB), but same error on new file.  I tried rename to get rid of dots in filename, same error.

On second attempt, it says file already exists and has been upload before, but it does not show on the person.

Not sure what is going on.

Getting same issue with these profiles too: Novak-982, Ovnik-8, and Ovnik-6.

Now I see it is uploaded but not attached to any image.  If I attach, I see the comment is mistakenly listed for the title of the image:

https://www.wikitree.com/photo/jpg/Ovnik-6-1

Something is broken in the upload software.

Answer 1

so, the error message about it being too complex is misleading... the problem is more likely that its too large...

and the thing about image size has nothing to do with the actual file size... it has to do with the "image size" -- the total number of pixels it has.

For example, a 2500 x 3500 pixel image has 8,750,000 pixels in it, and each pixel requires 3 bytes of data (for RGB color), so that's about a 25 megabyte image.

The file size will be much smaller, because jpeg images are compressed. In other words, many, if not most of the pixels will be the same or similar in color, so it can "throw away" much of the repeated data, resulting in a file size closer to about 5 to 10 megabytes.

So re-saving an image to a higher compression does not change the actual image size (total number of pixels). You have to reduce the total number of pixels. Both will reduce the overall quality from the original image.

Comments

Interestingly, using PNG with same pixel size of 4 to 1 reduction I had tried on JPEG, it works perfectly.

Can we get the error message updated to refer to image pixel size, not file size?

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I can't help with the error message...  not sure who can make code changes other than Chris Whitten.

I had forgotten that png images are compressed. And better too, in that its a lossless compression, unlike jpg which is lossy (lossy compression actually throws away data that your eye will never see anyway -- in theory; but lossless compression will always restore to the original image.)