mdmnarca_jnklog

I emailed Tumblr. I have run a blog mainly focused on gifs for over a year now, and find uploading...

Thu, 23 May 2013 21:04:11 +0100

I emailed Tumblr.

I have run a blog mainly focused on gifs for over a year now, and find uploading gifs more and more difficult as time goes on. I know Tumblr arbitrarily rejects gifs that feature certain bright colours, and also mostly rejects gifs with any more than 80 frames at 500px, and around 100-120 frames at 400px or less. I end up having to upload many of the gifs I want to post into text posts (for which these limitations on gifs seemingly do not apply).

This is all very infuriating when there is no clear reason or explanation given on your site for why any of this should matter. What difference does it make to Tumblr if my gif has bright purple in it? Why does it even matter how many frames there are? Shouldn’t filesize be the only concern? It’s great that the size limit for gifs at 400px and under has gone up to 2MB recently, but I can barely take advantage of this extra megabyte when so many of the gifs I attempt to post fail.

I have also noticed that these limitations have become more severe over time. As an experiment I tried re-uploading many of my older gifs and found that where they once would upload, today they get the “error uploading image” message. In 2011 I uploaded a gif with 205 frames in it which is simply not possible today.

I don’t expect this email to prompt you to actually fix this ridiculous problem, or offer some kind of miraculous answer, all I would like to know is why these limits even exist, and why it is they appear to have become worse over time?

Here is Tumblr’s informative (and quite speedy) reply:

Hello,

Thanks for your suggestion! We’re always looking for ways to improve Tumblr, so we’ll share this with the rest of our team. Let us know if you think of anything else.

Thanks,

Jim

This effect… this “CRASH ZOOM OH NO IT’S OUT...

Wed, 22 May 2013 08:54:40 +0100

This effect… this “CRASH ZOOM OH NO IT’S OUT OF FOCUS” effect… I’m sure we’re treated to it more in special effects shots than in real-life actual camera footage. It’s like the modern equivalent of an obviously fake lens flare. Give it a rest, effects people, it was already old a decade ago and it makes your work look less real.

Wed, 22 May 2013 07:26:44 +0100

Wed, 22 May 2013 06:33:58 +0100

Maybe Yahoo can get uploading to work…

Wed, 22 May 2013 06:00:50 +0100

Maybe Yahoo can get uploading to work…

Wed, 22 May 2013 06:00:21 +0100

luckgaki: cammadanar: Bouncy. 立川譲 ‏@usagi_rakuda @emacannel...

Tue, 21 May 2013 23:08:16 +0100

luckgaki:

cammadanar:

Bouncy.

立川譲 ‏@usagi_rakuda

@emacannel 1原が千葉さんです。視聴ありがとーございますー^^

https://twitter.com/usagi_rakuda/status/336346066775584768

Ah! So it was by Takaaki Chiba. A chief animation director and also responsible for “Titan Setting”.

I like the show but I can’t help but find the (regular) titans kinda...

Tue, 21 May 2013 22:16:27 +0100

I like the show but I can’t help but find the (regular) titans kinda underwhelming.

Considering how they apparently wiped out a fifth of the population in the first arc, you rarely see more than one of them at a time and mostly all they do is slowly and aimlessly shamble around, picking up and eating only the people who happen to be directly in front of them, and those people are only there for the taking because they’ve got a bad case of anime petrification.

Like, if I was stomping around in a miniature town populated by mice, and the mice were afraid of me and knew to run away, I doubt I’d catch many of them at all. I could wreck their little mouse houses, but the mice would have run away long before then.

I mean, yeah, we see the titans pick up and eat people, and sometimes they smash a wall or something, and there was that one titan who was looking at those guys through the window, but what we see doesn’t really match how horror inducing and population devastating they supposedly are? They seem too few and too dumb and passive. At least for me, anyway.

gana-s2: shingeki 07 因みに提供バック。Aパート/1原長谷川ひとみ...

Tue, 21 May 2013 21:22:04 +0100

gana-s2:

shingeki 07

因みに提供バック。Aパート/1原長谷川ひとみ 2原/かとみBパート田中宏紀（敬称略でした。

— 立川譲さん (@usagi_rakuda)

2013年5月19日

I couldn’t decide whether to single out those shots or make a longer gif of the scene, so have...

Tue, 21 May 2013 21:21:39 +0100

I couldn’t decide whether to single out those shots or make a longer gif of the scene, so have both.

Bouncy.

Tue, 21 May 2013 21:21:00 +0100

Bouncy.

Tue, 21 May 2013 21:20:00 +0100

Photo

Mon, 20 May 2013 19:55:00 +0100

Photo

Sun, 19 May 2013 13:14:34 +0100

Let’s call Sushio Toshio Ishizaki while we’re at it.

Sun, 19 May 2013 11:52:13 +0100

Let’s call Sushio Toshio Ishizaki while we’re at it.

sushiobunny: Ryosuke Sawa

Sun, 19 May 2013 11:51:00 +0100

sushiobunny:

Ryosuke Sawa

ARGH

Sun, 19 May 2013 03:23:00 +0100

ARGH

I’ve been covertly attempting to improve some of the shoddier looking gifs I’ve posted in the past year, what with the new 2MB limit to take advantage of, and FAILING A LOT because so many of them have too many frames. That is to say, gifs with so many frames that could upload a year ago would not be able to be posted now. I tried reuploading the old ones and they failed.

I’ve said before there seems to be no concrete number to the limit at 400px and less, it’s somewhere around 100 frames but sometimes you can go over it, and that’s what’s really confusing. A year ago I could post a gif smaller than 400px with 120 frames. Today I can’t. So at some point in the past year someone somewhere in Tumblr HQ decided that this was a change that was needed. That the amount of frames a gif can have needs to be limited. A limit like this can’t just happen out of thin air… right? People are actually in control of this… right?

But these same people who are making an apparently conscious decision to limit the gifs that are posted on their website also decided it’s perfectly okay for the filesize to go up to 2MB. So we can have better looking gifs, with better compression and larger colour palettes (assuming Tumblr doesn’t hate one of those colours which is a whole other kettle of fish) but they also need to be pointlessly short and/or choppy when it’s fully within the capabilities of the 2MB filesize limit for them not to be.

I know I keep moaning about this when I say I’ll stop, and I’m mostly retreading old moans here, but today I noticed that back in 2011 I uploaded a gif to Tumblr at 500px that had 205 frames. TWO-HUNDRED AND FIVE FRAMES. That shit wouldn’t fly today! You’re lucky to get away with more than even 80 frames at that resolution now.

You can get around the colour and frame issues by uploading images into a text post, which is great and also confusing, but the 2MB limit that I really want to make use of doesn’t even apply to text posts God damn it!

Why are you such a confusing fucking website. Why? You don’t actually know, do you? You wouldn’t even be able to tell me, would you?

Sun, 19 May 2013 01:33:42 +0100

Photo

Fri, 17 May 2013 22:57:06 +0100

Photo

Fri, 17 May 2013 22:28:01 +0100