Help Picture uploads blurry

[Mynameismas]

Ok so I got the note 3 and I really do love this phone but I think I need to go back to my iPhone for 1 reason.

Every time I take a picture it comes out clean and crisp, but when I upload it to Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, it looks like complete shit, it really bothers me that on every thing I try to send a picture on unless it's an email the quality of the image is horrible. Please fix this Android I love the note 3 but I can't deal with the picture quality messing up so bad, it's embarrassing to send pictures now because it looks like they were taken with a flip phone

Thank you
Massimo

 

[breadnatty08]

Welcome to the forums, Massimo!
Do you recall if the photos taken with your iPhone did any compressing when uploaded?
It is likely a limitation of those apps rather than your phone. They probably require photos uploaded to be a max size so you can't upload a 10Mb photo for example. And Instagram crops them for sure.

 

[dynomot]

Yes Photobucket compressors the photos from mine as well. It is a limitation of the site your uploading to, not the Note 3.

 

[Simon_Gardner]

Yes Photobucket compressors the photos from mine as well. It is a limitation of the site your uploading to, not the Note 3.

Here's a photographer's tip for uploading to Facebook. Upload as .png. Unlike .jpg it isn't a lossy picture format. If you upload a .jpg what you have is lossy picture format recompressed by Facebook to be a further loss and thus degradation of the picture even more.

In general, try not to turn any picture into .jpg until the very last minute. You will always lose quality. It's the nature of .jpg. If you are editing a .jpg, don't re-save in .jpg as you go along; you are heaping image degradation on top of degradation.

Not sure it helps you much here.

(I shoot in RAW - even on my pocket cameras - which is a non lossy format. Though now sometimes, I shoot simultaneous RAW/jpg - the latter for instant use by the phone.)

 

[Mynameismas]

But the thing is when I email the same exact photo to my self and upload it with my Ipod, It looks just as clear as it should, there's something wrong with the Android apps, and Sms pictures are ruined as well

 

[Scootmien]

Ok so I got the note 3 and I really do love this phone but I think I need to go back to my iPhone for 1 reason.

Every time I take a picture it comes out clean and crisp, but when I upload it to Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, it looks like complete shit, it really bothers me that on every thing I try to send a picture on unless it's an email the quality of the image is horrible. Please fix this Android I love the note 3 but I can't deal with the picture quality messing up so bad, it's embarrassing to send pictures now because it looks like they were taken with a flip phone

Thank you
Massimo

Here's a photographer's tip for uploading to Facebook. Upload as .png. Unlike .jpg it isn't a lossy picture format. If you upload a .jpg what you have is lossy picture format recompressed by Facebook to be a further loss and thus degradation of the picture even more.

In general, try not to turn any picture into .jpg until the very last minute. You will always lose quality. It's the nature of .jpg. If you are editing a .jpg, don't re-save in .jpg as you go along; you are heaping image degradation on top of degradation.

Not sure it helps you much here.

(I shoot in RAW - even on my pocket cameras - which is a non lossy format. Though now sometimes, I shoot simultaneous RAW/jpg - the latter for instant use by the phone.)

Welcome to the forum, Massimo.

You'd be wise to listen to what Simon has to say. By all accounts and by reading his other posts, he's a competent photographer with years of experience behind him and seems to know what he's talking about on this sort of thing.

As others have also said, photos get compressed by Facebook and as the Note 3 takes photos in a higher resolution and therefore a larger file format, they will naturally get compressed by Facebook upon upload. Taking into consideration the FB photo file limits, try setting the camera to take a picture in a smaller resolution and see if that also gets compressed upon FB upload.

 

[dynomot]

But the thing is when I email the same exact photo to my self and upload it with my Ipod, It looks just as clear as it should, there's something wrong with the Android apps, and Sms pictures are ruined as well

Weird. If you email a photo from one email account to another using just your Note 3 to send and access is it still blurry ? I've just took a random picture at best quality using "Auto", emailed it to myself from one account to another (it was a 3.8Meg 13megapixel .jpg) and it looks identical on my Note 3 and the PC and the details are exactly the same Ironically these screenshots are uploaded to photobucket and show the effect I thought you were describing on the phone (they look blurry) but not on the PC. It is a random shot of my SGS4 box. Incidentally the uploaded to photo rather than the screen shot is also blurry. I cannot get it to repeat via Email though only Photobucket.

THE EMAILED PHOTO



THE ORIGINAL

 

[chimphappyhour]

But the thing is when I email the same exact photo to my self and upload it with my Ipod, It looks just as clear as it should, there's something wrong with the Android apps, and Sms pictures are ruined as well

SMS will always mess with your photos. That's just the nature of SMS. (Well, actually MMS) The carriers don't want that system to get clogged and jammed by everyone sending full size photos around. So if you want to send your photos in "all their glory", never use SMS/MMS. That's not what it is designed for.

As for apps versus email, email doesn't care what the data is as long as you don't exceed the attachment limit on either email service's end. Usually most email services will limit email size to 10mb. Jpgs from most cameras (not all though) will easily fit into this category. So far, the largest jpg I've turned out of my Note 3 is 9.1mb and that was a decent sized panorama that'll end up printing out at 7 inches by 7.5 feet.

Apps on the other hand, you're at the mercy of the developers and what they want to deal with. I avoid FB like the plague so I can't answer to that but I know even Google Plus, in all of their claiming to want to be more photocentric, does downsize photos that you load through their app. So this could be an app thing or the various services looking for a way to limit how much data they have to house. (Although, the photos still look pretty good on G+ once they get over there.)

 

[akilla21]

But the thing is when I email the same exact photo to my self and upload it with my Ipod, It looks just as clear as it should, there's something wrong with the Android apps, and Sms pictures are ruined as well

I too, am experiencing this issue. But for me I am doing something different. I have gpegs loaded on a WD storage device. All my devices (2 wins 7 pc's, Macbook, ipad 4, 2 iphones 3gs, 2 samsung s4) can all see the images in the quality that the photos were taken in. But my recently purchased Samsung Note 3 8" shows the photos blurry.

Theres no way, I can come to the conclusion that its the photo. I even downloaded a picture to see if the note had a problem with the data transfer and interpreting the format. Same results... there is something wrong with the android fw not able to read high quality images that it didnt create.

 

[Simon_Gardner]

I too, am experiencing this issue. But for me I am doing something different. I have gpegs loaded on a WD storage device. All my devices (2 wins 7 pc's, Macbook, ipad 4, 2 iphones 3gs, 2 samsung s4) can all see the images in the quality that the photos were taken in. But my recently purchased Samsung Note 3 8" shows the photos blurry.

Theres no way, I can come to the conclusion that its the photo. I even downloaded a picture to see if the note had a problem with the data transfer and interpreting the format. Same results... there is something wrong with the android fw not able to read high quality images that it didnt create.

Hmm. Well this is all very interesting. The only thing I use my phone camera for is to take pictures of parking payment receipts through the windscreen of the car as a memo. BUT

 

[BlueBiker]

Here's a photographer's tip for uploading to Facebook. Upload as .png. Unlike .jpg it isn't a lossy picture format. If you upload a .jpg what you have is lossy picture format recompressed by Facebook to be a further loss and thus degradation of the picture even more.

How is this relevant? If Facebook resamples or otherwise converts the images you upload, it won't make any difference what the original format was or whether it was lossy or lossless. I don't know why the OP's photos became blurry, but it wasn't because they were submitted as .JPG.

In fact, it's counterproductive to capture an original .JPG image and then convert it to .PNG (which involves one level of degradation) just to send it to Facebook (which will add a second level of degradation if it ends up converting the file back to .JPG).

In general, try not to turn any picture into .jpg until the very last minute. You will always lose quality. It's the nature of .jpg. If you are editing a .jpg, don't re-save in .jpg as you go along; you are heaping image degradation on top of degradation.

This matters to a professional photographer like you who performs multiple load/save sessions with many steps of retouching, but I don't think it'll provide a benefit to most others. If all someone's doing is loading a 13 megapixel Note 3 photo, playing with a few effects, and then saving as a 1 megapixel picture to upload, might as well just leave it as .JPG.

 

[Simon_Gardner]

In fact, it's counterproductive to capture an original .JPG image and then convert it to .PNG

(1) I don't. I don't shoot in JPG at all.
(2) If you read what I wrote it was about editing the original anyway - such as cropping or altering contrast etc. Obviously if you don't touch the original you aren't going to be converting anything.

If all someone's doing is loading a 13 megapixel Note 3 photo, playing with a few effects, and then saving as a 1 megapixel picture to upload, might as well just leave it as .JPG.

No. That was the point.