Category talk:NARA TIF images with categorized JPGs

Category reasoning

Was there a discussion about creating this category? I see a lot of TIFF files having existing categories replaced with this category. The reason I ask is: The TIFF files are, in theory, the more original ones, yet it seems to be that the JPEGs retain the categories. (On the other hand, the JPEGs are easier for the servers to thumbnail, I suppose.) I wouldn't want the categorization to go very far and then have a discussion come up, in which users think that the TIFF files should have categories instead, or something like that. --Closeapple (talk) 06:32, 26 March 2012 (UTC)

TIF format is an old format, uncompressed. The files are enormous, I prefer to use JPEG format. BTW, the original category was much older (Category:NARA TIF images with catagorized JPGs). --Chris.urs-o (talk) 06:57, 26 March 2012 (UTC)

The JPEG images quality is better/sharper than the TIF images. This category helps relieve an image's topic/location categories from having a double load of the same images, and the dilution from that repetition.—Look2See1 (talk) 07:39, 26 March 2012 (UTC)

The JPEGs are sharper than the TIFFs? TIFFs are supposed to be lossless data compression. What did NARA do to the TIFFs to make them worse than the JPEGs, and why do the TIFFs exist if the (lossy) JPEGs are sharper? Or did you mean only that the Wikimedia servers create sharper reductions of JPEGs than of TIFFs? --Closeapple (talk) 07:44, 26 March 2012 (UTC)

The bigger problem are the duplicates crowding the directories. --Chris.urs-o (talk) 08:24, 26 March 2012 (UTC)

The "Wikimedia servers create sharper reductions of JPEGs than of TIFFs" on the various equipment I view them on. The TIFFs are not lost, on the JPEG page one can click on the TIFF thumbnail midway down, and open that file. Is that a problem? I agree that "the duplicates crowding the directories" is the paramount problem, which this category is addressing.—Look2See1 (talk) 01:28, 29 March 2012 (UTC)

I mostly wanted to make sure it was at least discussed; it seemed odd to make an exception to the "categorize everything" way of Commons, unless it was discussed, since it would be better to have useless things as duplicates than to have useful things missing. I guess it's discussed now. ;-) Now I also understand why JPEG was the format chosen to stay categorized. --Closeapple (talk)

Tiff and PNG files are for (further?) editing and JPEG's are for display. These large files very often look fuzzier than smaller jpg versions, because they don't scale well.

Tiff's and png files are dense source reference material, one step down from raw in a camera.

Consequently there should be no automatic deletion of tiff or PNG formats just because jpeg versions exist; also because they are source they need to be accessible.

When improving the clarity of a jpg is required, it is made from the tiff. In an ideal world we should only upload one tiff or png and and the jpg version for every image, even then I think it necessary for art only. Generally we rely on museum's to keep the the larger source files. On websites including Wikipedia, jpg's are used because they scale better than Tiff or png's and they obviously load faster because they are smaller.

The files we are talking about are uploaded in the main from American government owned institutions, in a sense they have too many files to carefully curate, though they try. Their legacy systems tend to be confused and make multiple versions of the same image available for scraping, often they have duplicates with different names for the same file. Our uploading bots get confused because exactly the same image is uploaded in different sizes, because the checksum's are different for every image. That statement in itself may be an over simplification for the problem.

Somewhere in the policy it states There should be only one exact copy of a file. In practise that means we keep a file for reference and a file for general use. Duplicates, jpg's generally, (I feel) should be deleted, but admins instead redirect them to the file meant for use. Fair enough, we delete nothing.

What's happening here is not right, hiding files in the ether by taking off categories and putting them into this hidden category is not going to solve the problem you have; only redirection is going to do that. The vast majority of editors seeing these files will assume they require categorising.

There are smartass's on the project that dont understand what should be and what would should not be a hidden category. NARA TIF images with categorized JPGs should not be a hidden category, that's for sure. The files should be re-directed as I said.

Not only that: I feel if they are not re-directed and have to rely on the category NARA TIF images with categorized JPGs then they should have a large banner prominent on the page saying This file does not require Categorisation and should be ignored. Of course that's a time waster, the files would still be in everyone's way being constantly revisited, a maintenance nightmare.

Broichmore (talk) 15:56, 2 November 2020 (UTC)

I have added a short sentence to the description of the rationale. The idea of redirecting may have merits, but I'm failing understand what is to be redirected to where. Jim.henderson (talk) 16:16, 2 November 2020 (UTC)

@Jim.henderson: Jim, I mean redirect surplus jpg's to best copy jpg, and surplus tiff's etc to best copy tiff etc., and so on. This is just too complicated. Why is this particular category got to be hidden? Putting it in plain view would sort out multiple problems. I also notice the files have to be linked if a tiff is assigned to this category, that's an immense maintenance overhead.

Meanwhile files meant to be used, as these are, should not be hidden, the files to hide if any are duplicates of file types which should be unused and therefore redirected.

Added to that, this seems to be an effort to simplify and clean up category pages. The purpose of categories was to contain all relevant files. That's why Gallery pages were made, to display showpiece or single versions of files. Personally I don't like the latter, and feel they should be used only in extreme or special cases, but that's their purpose. Using them has to be a better way than to hide files. Broichmore (talk) 12:36, 3 November 2020 (UTC)

It would be good to have some clarity here soon as there numerous of these tifs from NARA that are being flagged for categorisation. I suggest a small easy, hopefully uncontroversial, step would be to make this category unhidden as Broichmore suggests. --Headlock0225 (talk) 11:39, 21 December 2021 (UTC)