Unusable images when downloaded

Question

Hi, 
 
 I'm trying to download the following image, which is at /technologies/passive-components/f/forum/54014/can-someone-help-identifying-what-this-are-i-reckon-it-is-an-old-diod-need-something-to-replace-it-with/217176 
 because I need to rotate it so I can see it properly (and at its original resolution). 
 
 However, when I right-click in Chrome and select Save image as.. I only get the option of saving it in a format called .avif. What software opens that? I have tried MS Paint, and a fairly recent version of Paint Shop Pro, and neither of them can open it. 
 Is it some format configured in Verint? If so, please can .jpg and .png also be enabled? 
 I don't wish to install additional software merely to convert into a more popular format. JPG and PNG have near-universal support.

Dudley · Accepted Answer

I've had a second pass at this now and that code hit with the release yesterday. 
 Give this another go shabaz - what I've done is to enable image manager for most images in most situations, but I've prevented it from doing its thing when you click on an image to make it full screen. 
 This was a pain because I had to do it for each content type individually. For some unfathomable reason that I can't for the life of me work out, verint uses a different path entirely for images based on where it is - so I had to do the code separately for forums than I did for blogs (for example). That was the incorrect assumption I took previously which is why you were struggling before. 
 I'm saying all this because it's feasible there are one or two I've missed. 
 I've checked this for: 
 
 Forums 
 Blogs 
 RoadTest Reviews 
 Projects (which failed so I'll do that in the next release) 
 Comments 
 Attachments 
 
 All in all, it looks good to me with the exception of projects. I'll get that addressed in the next release.

cstanton · Answer

shabaz 
 cstanton said: it helps to present the web page within a reasonable time and automatically optimizes the images for presentation on a variety of internet access speeds, platforms, and browsers. cstanton said: we use an image manager from Akamai to optimize the delivery of the website images when they're presented on the web page that takes into account your internet speed, location, and other configurations for the image manager. This is a necessity. 
 I thought that you'd like more information on this, and it allows me to segue into what options we have to make the original image presentable. 
 
 Here's a snapshot from our image manager. over some time. What we can see here is how much work is done and how much data is saved by using the web-preferred file formats. Even images that are simple favicons can benefit from a 71% reduction in size and delivery while preserving their original perceived quality. 
 We can see from this that images are served mainly in WEBP and AVIF. Not too often are the image types preserved as png, jpg or gif. We do not have that many gifs used on the site anyway. 
 This compensates for members and staff uploading images that are not optimal for viewing on the web, and from the stats we can see there's a lot of them. 
 There are many different ways that images can be optimised that the image manager employs beyond setting the compression level, and there's a great Google Chrome for Developers video about it that I thought members would like to see: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F1kYBnY6mwg and there's a fantastic web tool that helps to adjust this in real-time that I often use: https://squoosh.app/ 
 It's also worth noting that we have been using this technology when we were on the older Jive platform, we then turned it off for various reasons when we switched to Verint, but this has been enabled since April 2022. 
 cstanton said: This doesn't stop me from talking with the development team about it though to see what options are available. 
 Now here's the important part, after looking through the image manager and talking with the development team, we may have an opportunity that will need testing, but it shouldn't impact performance significantly for the speed of serving a web page with images on to the person or tool assessing the page. 
 When you insert an image into a blog post, forum post, or other content on the element14 Community, Verint will use its methods to resize it and try to optimise the image itself. We know that this isn't optimal, mostly it resizes the image dimensions for its width and height, and so the image is run through the image manager that then presents its optimised version on the page after assessing the who and what is viewing it, which is then the ideal situation. 
 Here's an example, for the image that you have inserted into your forum post above, it presents the image from a website address such as this : 
 /resized-image/__size/1280x720/__key/communityserver-discussions-components-files/39/pastedimage1701379143347v1.png 
 If you click on that image, you will get the "full-sized", full-resolution image, which has a website address such as this: 
 /cfs-file/__key/communityserver-discussions-components-files/39/pastedimage1701379143347v1.png 
 At present, this is still handled by the image manager and so it will still be optimised before presenting it to you. 
 However, this gives us something we can work with in the image manager. 
 What we can do is tell the image manager to not convert images that are on the /cfs-file/ path served from the website, which should mean that the presented image on the page which uses the /resized-image/ website path, will be optimised and converted with the image manager and then we may not need to do this with the /cfs-file/ presented image when clicking on it for the full-size image and resolution, and so we can try to exclude the full-size view of the image from the image manager which will allow you to then save the image as the original file format and not a converted avif or webp. 
 I have raised this as a development ticket with the team to investigate and measure the impact of implementing it performance-wise. 
 If there's no measurable negative impact, then you'll be able to click on inserted images into content for the full view and resolution of the image then save it as the original file and do with it as you wish.

Dudley · Answer

In Tuesday's release I made a change to the image manager. 
 For most content, it will continue to sweep across pages, converting and caching as designed. There are a number of reasons we do this that Chris has already talked about, that I'm not going to elaborate on other than to say that the way that google expects our content to be presented forces our hand. 
 However, I've disabled it entirely for any situation where you click on an image to show the full image. Clicking on the image to pop it out will now show the image in the same format as was originally uploaded. This particular route won't cause any impact to search engines that don't really care about full screen popups, but should make a big difference to you. 
 So to be 100% clear on what I think should work: 
 
 Open a piece of content (e.g. /technologies/passive-components/f/forum/54014/can-someone-help-identifying-what-this-are-i-reckon-it-is-an-old-diod-need-something-to-replace-it-with/217176 ) 
 If you right click to save the image in the comment as is, it will come down as an avif, png, webp, or jpeg2000 (depending on a whole bunch of factors)

If you click on the image to enlarge it, and then right click to save the image, it will come down in the same format as was originally uploaded

This will have a small performance impact on loading full screen images but this won't affect our SEO and there are probably other circumstances where image manager might compromise the image being looked at and this provides a useful workaround. 
 Do you want to give this a go and let me know if you have problems? You shouldn't have to clear out your browser cache, but if you still see it misbehaving, you may want to try a shift-f5 on the page you're trying to remove the cache.

Unusable images when downloaded

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