[Off-Topic] Re: [Breezy] new "Services" capplet

[Vincent Trouilliez]

> This is Off-Topic, so, sorry.
> 
> If you want to upload a screen-shot in PNG file format, changing the
> background of your Desktop will help a lot in reducing it's size!  Try
> comparing two screen-shots, one with the same background as in the one
> found in the above, and the other with a plain one color background and
> see the difference of the size.
> 
> Again, sorry.

Don't be sorry Ziyad, I have noticed it as well, and it does annoy me no
end as well ! :-/ 
At first I thought that it was a bug in Gnome's screenshot utility, that
would cause such extreme variations in file size. Full screen shot would
sometimes be small/acceptable (about 100KB or less), and sometimes they
would be huge, between 500KB and 1MB !
It is extremely annoying. 100KB for a full screen image is okay for
dial-up, but 1MB is not acceptable !
So an hour ago, I was about to file a bug about this. Then I realized
what you just said... the problem is that PNG format, unlike JPG, hates
"photo" like pictures, it can't compress them well apparently. However
when the pic is just a shot of GUI window (large areas of uniform
colors) it does wonders, and the text is crystal clear/sharp, whereas
with JPEG, the text would be blurry, for the same file size.

I think the screenshot utility should be reworked, to take this into
account. For example, once the shot is taken, it could compute the
estimated size of resulting the PNG file, and display it. Then you could
have a radio button to select either PNG or JPEG format. JPEG for
"photo" like pics, and PNG for everything else.
Or we could make it simpler still. Gnome could figure it out by itself.
For example, if the the user is doing a full screen shot, and if the PNG
is going to be over, say, 200KB in size, then it probably means that it
should be better compressed as JPEG.

What do you think ? I think I will file a "bug" report about this, it's
really very *annoying* (euphemism...)



--
Vince