Ah sorry I misunderstood you. We keep the original image around and provide different sizes for different platforms/resolutions/dpis/etc.

You should seriously consider doing this for your mobile client; the worst thing about Discord is that it eats mobile data if you're uploading lots of images.

That’s exactly the reason why the iOS Mail app asks you whether you want to attach an image in small/medium/large/original size.

Data aside, my phone takes pictures at ridiculously high resolutions. Whenever I go to send pictures with discord, it takes a good 30 seconds and half the time it'll just break.

As an aside, I wish the "share" button would share a lower resolution image instead. I don't mind storing the full quality picture, but handling a 10mb image is seriously silly.

The other side of this is if you're on mobile data and they decide to resize the images on the client then people will complain about the app eating up battery life because it's using so much CPU to resize the images. Plus, they won't have the full size image to share with people you may be chatting with on desktop. If you want to not use so much data while uploading images then you should probably resize them yourself or just not upload images unless you're on wifi.

There's no reason this couldn't be a two-step process, resizing to something reasonable on the client then fine-tuning it on the server. I'm presuming you don't see the need to start with multi-megapixel images.

> I'm presuming you don't see the need to start with multi-megapixel images.

Might be a fair presumption today, but might not be for the future with hiDPI screens, VR etc... for the relative storage costs, it'd be better to have the original, and then you can programmatically run from there.

Today's hiDPI screens can already display more detail than your eye can perceive. The issue wasn't about storage costs, it was about transmission costs which still matter for the foreseeable future.

Perhaps, but I think you can compress current-day phone images considerably without losing any actual image fidelity (because the sensor pitch significantly exceeds the lens resolution, and .. noise).