I noticed over the last few days that images I posted looked different somehow.  They appeared to be distorted, as though the JPG compression had been cranked up too high and was causing significant artifacts in the pictures themselves.  Being daft as I am, I wondered if it had something to do with the new site theme.  I inherently knew that was not the case, but the timing seemed to coincide.

Did it ever occur to me that I should check my image editing software?  Of course not!

Then today I posted the parakeet photos.  Now, let’s be clear: the originals weren’t impressive to begin with for the reasons I noted in that post.  Nevertheless, I was shocked at the terrible quality of the images once they were uploaded.  That’s when I finally decided to figure it out.

The first thing I did was go back to the originals and compare them with the edited versions.  Before manipulating them, and even considering their poor quality, they looked much better than what was up here.  So I began tinkering around with them to see what might be causing the degradation.

Much to my chagrin and surprise, I found I had unwittingly altered a setting that changed how images were resized.  Instead of using a smart system to determine the best resize method, I had it set to always resize using a very lossy algorithm.  Oops.

I’ve now gone back and reposted all the photos I’ve uploaded in the past few days.  The differences are noticeable and appreciable.

Don’t ask me how I modified the setting.  I normally don’t touch it except in very specific cases; I’ve not done so in quite some time.  It’s probable I fat fingered it.

Anyway, it’s fixed, all recent photos are fixed and reposted, and I’ll try not to let it happen again.