Uploaded listing photos not as sharp as originals

1

Greetings all! I’m new around here and have a listing photos question I’m hoping one of the vets around here can answer. I spend a lot of time taking photos of my cottage (tripod, DSLR, exposure bracketing, etc…) and an equal length of time doing post processing (tonemapping, additional PS work) only to see the work get mangled after they were uploaded to the Airbnb site last night. ALL the photos I sent up last night have a soft focus which is really disappointing because I took so much care to make sure everything was razor sharp.

Does anyone know why this is happening? Surely I must be doing something wrong as they cannot be downsampling them so much that everyone’s pics look this bad.

The sizes I uploaded were between 11 and 22 megs and were all 5000x3000 JPGs. Am I sending files that are too big?

To compare, here’s what the image really looks like:

https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B-rxwlH2XSLiUllJUEVuN180azQ/view?usp=sharing

and compare that to the 9th image in my listing to see what their downsampled image looks like:

I can’t be the only here with this issue, right?

Thanks for reading.

~Steven

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There is a search feature on this site if you’d like to find out if you are the only one with the issue.

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Thanks @KKC. I searched the archives before I posted. There was a post with a similar issue in Feb but it was not resolved.

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These do actually seem quite large. I tried uploading large images, and they didn’t upload properly.

Have you tried uploading smaller sizes? And by smaller, I mean, much smaller. It’s perfectly possible to get sharp good looking photos (at the resolutions Airbnb render them) at a few hundred Kb, in my opinion. You could also try talking to people on a tech forum. Stack Exchange is a good place to ask about such things. The Photography and Graphic Design SEs would be reasonable places to check out.

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Thanks @faheem. I’m going to knock down the weight and pixels size and reupload a few to compare.

Appreciate the tips on the two other site options as well!

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Yeah… my first thought is that with too fine of detail being “compressed” to whatever level Air uses that there may be - let’s call them ‘compression errors’ in the downsampling, which would give you the soft focus.

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Yes, the pictures are too large.

Resize them to a smaller format before you upload them. I normaly use 1280pix on the short edge.

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@KenH and @Chris - thanks. I knocked down pixel size of all the effected pics (smallest side to 1280) and reuploaded. I am seeing some improvement! I appreciate the assistance.

~Steven

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Oh yes the images you uploaded are much too large.
1800x1200 is more than sufficient
Do you have photoshop?
If so then may I suggest that after resizing your image to 1800x1200 you do the following:
Filter
Unsharp Mask
Then in the window set
Amount to 99%
Radius to 0.4 Pixels
Threshold 0 Pixels

Look closely at your image on the screen at 100% and then flip between Edit
undo & redo
If you can see the difference between the unsharpened and sharpened images then you’ve gone too far

Make sure that this is the last thing you do before uploading any image

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Or one can probably do similar, if not identical things, using the GIMP.

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Thanks @George_Carol. I’ll use these PS settings moving forward!