After John Gruber pointed out a very nice article about the web site optimization for dConstruct, with his special emphasis on image size, I was reminded of the appalling state of sharing images that we have on iOS. Take emailing for example: the only place where you can adjust the size of the images you are sending is from the photos app. No control from either the mail app, or the standard mail dialog. Not even iPhoto offers any control about file size. And this even though the image size dialog is done very discreetly, it shows the email size, and pressing on it gives you access to compression options.
Would it really be so hard offer the size controls from the photos send dialog everywhere? Or even have a context menu where you can select the output size per image? In the presentation for the new iPad 2012, Apple showed that LTE was the answer for downloading huge images via email. Wouldn’t the right solution be to compact the images? Images can compressed down to around 100 KByte 1 and still look very acceptable even on the Retina iPad, you do not need to send 4 MByte full camera resolution images.
I do understand Apple’s desire to keep things easy by not burdening the user with decisions, but if you email images, aren’t they for viewing on screen, and wouldn’t it be more important to have the images load quickly instead of being super quality? So why not adopt the image size dialog from photos systemwide and make it default to 1024×1024?
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These are compressed in Aperture, fit to 900 by 900, jpg quality 6↩