Am I alone being pi$$ed off by JPG/PNG pictures being saved as WEBP/AVIF?

[abolibibelot]

For a few years now, an increasing number of websites have exhibited that stupid weirdness, or weird stupidness, regarding how pictures embedded within a page are named, and loaded, and saved when a visitor decides to do so: for instance, a picture appears to be named “somewhat.jpg”, but when you save it, it gets saved as “somewhat.webp”, and is in fact a WEBP file; now if you go to “Page information” on Firefox (or whatever it's called in your localized version), you can see that the link indeed ends with “.../somewhat.jpg”, and from there it will be saved with the name “somewhat.jpg”, but will in fact be a WEBP file (which is not recognized by the Windows 7 explorer, and I doubt that it's displayed natively even in Windows 11) despite the .jpg extension; even if you copy the link and load that single picture in the browser, and save it, it will be saved as WEBP... BUT if you copy the link and download the picture with a basic curl command, you'll get a “somewhat.jpg” file which is indeed a JPG file! How come? Do other browsers behave differently?
Sometimes even curl gets a WEBP file. Sometimes saving from “Page information” allows to get an actual JPG file – even though the file type puzzlingly appears as “WEBP picture”. Like Chewbacca on planet Endor, it does not make sense.
The same happens with PNG pictures, and instead of WEBP it can be AVIF (which is an even less widely recognized format, neither XnView nor IrfanView can read it – granted, I'm using versions from 2017 and 2018 respectively...).

For instance, that page (linked in that thread):
https://www.easeus.com/file-recovery/recover-deleted-files-on-ssd.html
It's an unusual example, as some pictures appearing as PNG are indeed saved as PNG files, while some are saved as WEBP, for no obvious reason.

https://www.easeus.com/images/en/data-recovery/drw-pro/screenshots/ssd-data-loss-scenarios.png
=> saved as PNG (size = 119311)
https://www.easeus.com/images/en/data-recovery/drw-pro/screenshots/choose-run-as.png
=> saved as PNG (size = 168673)
https://www.easeus.com/images/en/data-recovery/drw-pro/screenshots/type-the-command-to-check-trim.png
=> saved as PNG (size = 50724)
https://www.easeus.com/images/en/data-recovery/drw-pro/screenshots/recover-hard-drive-step1.png
=> saved as WEBP (size = 32674)
=> a curl command with that link fetches an actual PNG picture (size = 36948)
https://www.easeus.com/images/en/data-recovery/drw-pro/screenshots/recover-hard-drive-step2.png
=> saved as PNG (size = 31750)
https://www.easeus.com/images/en/data-recovery/drw-pro/screenshots/recover-hard-drive-step3.png
=> saved as WEBP (size = 85858)
=> a curl command with that link fetches an actual PNG picture (size = 91312)

It has become so pervasive, even TVTropes, an old website with a basic design that hasn't evolved much since its inception, has that crap now.

What can possibly be the rationale for this? The WEBP/AVIF version is more compressed (sometimes visibly of much lesser quality than the JPG/PNG counterpart) and has a smaller size, but, since the actual JPG or PNG picture is also stored on the website, it does not reduce the amount of space used by each picture, it adds MOAR globally. Perhaps it's a tiny bit fewer bits to transfer for regular visitors who do not go out of their way to save each picture in the best quality available, but isn't that somewhat ridiculous to save something like 20% in bandwitdth (less than that in the example above) for pictures which are usually about 100KB to 1MB in size (less than that in the example above), when the bulk of data transfers nowadays is due to videos and gazillions of tracking and profiling marketing technologies?

(And this is my 1000th post...)

[ozymango]

Save yourself a lot of headaches by installing the "Save Image as Type" extension in your browser.

For Chrome or Brave: https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/save-image-as-type/gabfmnliflodkdafenbcpjdlppllnemd?pli=1

For Firefox: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/siat/

For Edge: https://microsoftedge.microsoft.com/addons/detail/save-image-as-type/colccedogjmcpmejg...ljbkkgohngadnb

I'm sure there's a reason for "webp" but yeah, it makes me wanna throw things across the room when I go to download a graphic and I get the webp extension.

[JoeS99]

I'm another one who prefers jpg files because I still use VuePrint to browse and adjust image files. It's an old program but I haven't found anything that compares in ease of use, etc. I made some batch files that use ffmpeg or ImageMagick to convert webp/avif to jpg.
I'll check out the extensions ozymango mentioned. I didn't know they existed.

[GAhere]

Why "Webp"?

From the horses mouth..

https://www.adobe.com/creativecloud/file-types/image/raster/webp-file.html

"Google created the WebP file format to make online images less bulky. With significantly reduced photo and graphic sizes, websites load faster and give users a better experience. Learn more about how the WebP file format works."....

...
What is a WebP file?

Google launched the WebP format as part of its mission to make loading times faster across the internet. WebP allows websites to display high-quality images — but with much smaller file sizes than traditional formats such as PNG and JPEG.

You can choose to save WebP files with either lossless or lossy compression. This means you can either compress images without losing data or with losing only some non-essential information. Google’s developers have suggested that lossless WebP images can be up to 26% smaller than PNGs.

You can quickly tell whether a file is a WebP image by looking out for the .WEBP extension. ...


History of the WebP file.

The WebP format is relatively new, dating back to 2010. On2 Technologies — a company acquired by Google — created the original concept.

... Each WebP file consists of VP8 or VP8L image data. Over the years, the format has evolved to keep pace with shifting consumer habits and emerging digital trends. Google added support for animation and transparency in 2011, and the format is now compatible with web browsers beyond just Google products.

Google Chrome natively supports WebP, and other web browsers like Firefox, Edge, and Opera. However, it also encourages web developers and designers to first convert PNG and JPEG files to WebP to speed up page loading times. ...




Basically IF you are running a MODERN OS version with a MODERN browser and MODERN photo editing software that nativel opens WebP you will not have any issues opening WebP files.

OS, Browser and photo editing software designed AFTER 2010 shouldn't have any issues with opening WebP files.

WebP files exist to make your online experience much faster but yet not degrade into pixelization..

[abolibibelot]

@JoeS99
Like I said, you can usually get native JPG or PNG pictures directly from the website with a curl command, which prevents two lossy conversions.

curl -k https://website.com/link/to/the/picture.jpg -O

-O [uppercase O] will save the picture as a “picture.jpg” file which is usually an actual JPG file (or PNG if it's natively a PNG picture).
To specify a name use -o "file name.jpg" [lowercase “o”]
-k is a shorthand for --insecure, which means: “Allow connections to SSL sites without certs (H)”, from what I understand it bypasses a security check with https:// links. Although usually not required it's better to use --cacert [name of a certificate file] which means: “CA certificate to verify peer against (SSL)” – although I couldn't properly explain what that means technically or why it matters, or not...
You can test with the examples below.
Sometimes you have to remove extra parameters from the link to get the best quality available.
Also sometimes removing an explicit resolution in the file name allows to get a picture in the best resolution available, which is stored on the website although not directly accessible. For instance in this article, this picture is embedded in the page, with a resolution of 1068x891 as specified in the link, and no higher resolution is made available, but if you remove the “-1068x891” suffix, you get a better quality 1248x1041 picture. (In that case both pictures are saved as JPG files, with none of that stealth-conversion-to-WEBP nonsense. In that case the difference is minor but sometimes this simple trick allows to get a much higher resolution than the embedded picture.)


@ozymango
Alright, but that extension is meant to convert to a preferred format, not to retrieve the best version available on a website, so it adds yet another lossy conversion, which defeats the purpose.
(Plus having to manage a gazillion of browser extensions is a source of headaches in and of itself; a dozen or so oughta be a maximum IMO.)

How come curl can (usually) retrieve the original picture with the correct file type while the browser can't? Are the WEBP/AVIF versions actually stored on the website or generated dynamically each time the picture is accessed? (Another thing that pi$$es me off: web pages with dynamically displayed content, that appears when scrolling down or up to it then disappears when scrolling away from it, making it impossible to for instance display all comments to an article all at once, in order to save the whole thing as a single file – with an extension like the aptly named SingleFile, since Firefox could never do that natively, which is yet another aggravation. Or articles which automatically load a new article as you reach the end, then another, then another, ad infinitum, while changing the title at the top of the browser's window and the title of the file when it's being saved at that point, when all I want is to read that one article in its entirety and save that one article with no extra crap I don't give a crap about. Or websites that continuously load a whole bunch of new entries as you're merely nearing the bottom of the page, ad infinitum, making it virtually impossible to get a sense of completion, as in, “alright, I've seen enough random crap from teh Internetz for today, I can go the f**k to sleep now” – Quora is a major offender in that department.)

As for the reason, perhaps whoever designed this will tell ya that it's meant to reduce energy consumption and carbon footprint, but it reminds me of such articles with recommendations such as “shower, don't bathe”, or “wash your hands with cold water”, or “turn the faucet off while you brush your teeth” in order to “lower your carbon footprint” and “mitigate climate change” (not only are such actions almost meaningless in the grand scheme of things, but saving water isn't even remotely related with carbon footprint or greenhouse gas emissions in general), written by the same spoiled b*tch who writes countless articles about how wonderful it is to travel all year round to fancy places while being paid for it...
And yeah, all pictures in those articles are embedded as highly compressed WEBP files, with an average size of ~100KB, loading the links without the compression parameters yields WEBP with an average size of ~500KB, whereas curl fetches JPG files with an average size of ~1MB, and even up to a whopping 29MB.
From the already linked article:

https://i.insider.com/5e4c113c3b62b751137e6b25?width=1000&format=jpeg&auto=webp
image embedded in the article, with reduction parameters
saved from Firefox as a WEBP file / size = 105448
https://i.insider.com/5e4c113c3b62b751137e6b25
without the reduction parameters
saved from Firefox as a WEBP file / size = 4028476
fetched with curl as a JPG file / size = 5200537

Or from this article:

https://i.insider.com/5e6f8f21c4854011ab57b923?width=700&format=jpeg&auto=webp
image embedded in the article, with reduction parameters
saved from Firefox as a WEBP file / size = 17014
https://i.insider.com/5e6f8f21c4854011ab57b923
without the reduction parameters
saved from Firefox as a WEBP file / size = 28139020
fetched with curl as a JPG file / size = 30755764

But I'm aware that these are all First World problems...
Sh*t, that video is no longer available, yet another thing to pi$$ me off! See attached file.

[thecoalman]

Firstly browsers do not rely on file extensions, e.g. file.php?id=123456 can be an image. They rely on the mime type sent by server in response and/or will sniff out what type of file it is.

Mismatched extension is probably not the issue though. If I were to guess the .jpg/.png request is being redirected to the .webp file, the software you are using isn't explicitly showing redirect. Also many sites are using CDN's these days which offer built in image optimization. Either way not changing source code on the page or on the fly transformation is being lazy.

WebP is quickly becoming de facto image standard, it supports all the best features available in .gif(animation), .png(lossless and alpha transparency) and .jpg(small file size) at significantly lower file sizes. If you are seeing lower quality images that's not the formats fault, it's because of what the web site owner chose.

That bandwidth savings may not seem important but it adds up quickly, especially if you are taking the time to optimize everything. In addition to saving server bandwidth it improves user experience, speed and optimization is one of the more important factors Google and other SE's use to rank sites.

[thecoalman]

Are the WEBP/AVIF versions actually stored on the website or generated dynamically each time the picture is accessed?

Either/Or..... For example if you are dynamically resizing a lot of images you might set up server cache of X size for most accessed files so you aren't burning through CPU. Rarely accessed files never make it into the cache preserving disk space. Depends on what your priorities and circumstances are.

If you are using CDN only the original source file may exist on origin server. CDN is set to cache files so origin only needs to process it once or on cache purge.

There is all kinds of things you can do depending on your needs.

[abolibibelot]

@“GAhere”
Thanks for this quite thorough piece of PSA.

You can choose to save WebP files with either lossless or lossy compression.

How? When that happens, I have no choice in the matter.

This means you can either compress images without losing data or with losing only some non-essential information. Google’s developers have suggested that lossless WebP images can be up to 26% smaller than PNGs.

The vast majority of WEBP pictures on websites nowadays appear to be lossy compressions.

You can quickly tell whether a file is a WebP image by looking out for the .WEBP extension. ...

No, that's part of the issue, in practice the extension is no longer a reliable indicator of what the file actually is...

Basically IF you are running a MODERN OS version with a MODERN browser and MODERN photo editing software that nativel opens WebP you will not have any issues opening WebP files.
OS, Browser and photo editing software designed AFTER 2010 shouldn't have any issues with opening WebP files.

Are WEBP and AVIF pictures natively displayed in Windows 10 or 11 Explorer?
I can open static WEBP pictures with XnView 2.41 (2017), not animated ones. I can open both static and animated WEBP pictures in IrfanView 4.51 (2018). Neither can open AVIF files. I haven't tested GIMP, which I use rarely, only when I need to do advanced editing, as it's too cumbersome to simply display and browse pictures (and XnView can do simple edits just fine). Obviously Firefox can open both types (even on my non-modern system).

WebP files exist to make your online experience much faster but yet not degrade into pixelization..

Alright, but why make it such a stealth, sneaky process, even when saving a picture, where the desired result is obviously to get the best quality available rather than the fastest speed, as in, silently converting a picture with a .jpg or .png extension into a WEBP file, sometimes even saving said picture with a .jpg or .png extension even though it is actually a WEBP file, and even though the actual JPG or PNG picture is there somewhere and can be fetched through other means, like curl, but not within the web browser? And again, while add all that mess to save ~20% on pictures while massively increasing the average size of web pages through the inclusion of gazillions of “non-essential” components which do not benefit the end user in any way?

As for the rest, I am not, and never will be a modern man...

[ozymango]

WebP files exist to make your online experience much faster but yet not degrade into pixelization..

Oh, yeah, this is why they keep changing formats and selling you a new computer and new phone -- "It makes your experience so much faster!" That's why we need to keep upgrading stuff!

Better image quality? Who cares! It's faster image quality! Faster faster faster! Except you still need to buy a new computer or phone or software to take advantage of the faster loading times. And then of course the images load much faster, but it still takes you an hour to get through to customer service.

[ozymango]

@ozymango
Alright, but that extension is meant to convert to a preferred format, not to retrieve the best version available on a website, so it adds yet another lossy conversion, which defeats the purpose.
(Plus having to manage a gazillion of browser extensions is a source of headaches in and of itself; a dozen or so oughta be a maximum IMO.)

Oh, sure, but then that makes this a philosophical discussion, not a technical one, and so people can go back and forth on this till the end of time and not get anything accomplished, besides having fun with a moot point. Can you get the results you want with the tools you have? Yes, but not in the way we want. Are other people satisfied with whatever they've got now? Yeah, but they're morons, and we still wanna do it our way anyway. Personally I use Linux for 99% of my computer work, and all my Linux tools handle webp and webm just fine, and they're free, and I stopped trying to convince anybody to try using Linux years ago.

[abolibibelot]

@“thecoalman”
Thanks for the in-depth explanation.

Mismatched extension is probably not the issue though. If I were to guess the .jpg/.png request is being redirected to the .webp file, the software you are using isn't explicitly showing redirect. Also many sites are using CDN's these days which offer built in image optimization. Either way not changing source code on the page or on the fly transformation is being lazy.

What are CDNs in a nutshell?
You mean lazy on the part of the browser's developpers, or the website administrators?
And what does curl do that the browser doesn't to actually fetch the origin JPG/PNG picture without that redirection?

WebP is quickly becoming de facto image standard, it supports all the best features available in .gif(animation), .png(lossless and alpha transparency) and .jpg(small file size) at significantly lower file sizes. If you are seeing lower quality images that's not the formats fault, it's because of what the web site owner chose.

Indeed the format does have technical advantages over the older ones you mentioned, but on most websites it's primarily used to generate quick and dirty compressions out of working pictures which are still overwhelmingly edited and rendered as JPG (just like MP3 and AVI, it's an antiquated format that just won't go the way of the dodo). It wouldn't be a problem if the whole workflows had been switched to WEBP, if the WEBP pictures were compressed with a decent quality (or at least could be accessed through the browser with a better quality for those who wish to save them – which must be a tiny minority of end users), and were always explicitly named with a .webp extension upon saving.

That bandwidth savings may not seem important but it adds up quickly, especially if you are taking the time to optimize everything. In addition to saving server bandwidth it improves user experience, speed and optimization is one of the more important factors Google and other SE's use to rank sites.

What is “optimizing” in that context?
Again, despite those efforts to save on bandwidth through the compression of pictures, the average size of web pages has massively increased through the years. For instance, compare the size of a regular Reddit thread and the size of the same thread loaded with an old.reddit.com link (using the old layout as the name implies), both saved with SingleFile (not SingleFileZ which saves pages in a compressed format) – the useful content (including pictures) is roughly the same (actually the older layout can include more comments, as comments nested beyond a certain level are transferred to a separate page with the “modern” layout), but the “modern” version is considerably larger. (As an example, I once saved that page with the regular link, and with the old.reddit.com link{*} – the latter has a size of 1198574 bytes, the former is a whopping 98951270 bytes, that's a 82:1 ratio; it compresses as a 505KB 7Z archive, so the bulk of the extra content is text and code, not pictures.)

Speaking of Reddit, while I'm at it: on such websites where there are many nested comments, some of which are hidden, some of which are only partially displayed, and one has to click on every single “+” or “See more comments” or “X more replies” or equivalent to load them all, then click on every single “See more” or equivalent to display the whole content{**}, in order to display everything there is to display before saving the page, is there any way to automate this stupidly tedious process?
Conversely, are there ways to prevent a website from automatically loading extra content that is not part of the currently visited page?


{*} By the way, I originally uploaded the video discussed in that thread on YouTube, and there's an error in the thread's title, it's from an episode of The Streets of San Francisco from 1977, not 1972.
{**} Sometimes clicking on “See more” (or equivalent) only reveals a single line, or even a single word, or even the end of a word, which can acually be shorter than “See more” – see the attached picture for a particularly egregious example. (If anyone is curious, it comes from that boringly trashy article, which was itself linked in that hilariously trashy article – that one could be a worthy entry to this thread.)

[thecoalman]

Oh, yeah, this is why they keep changing formats and selling you a new computer and new phone -- "It makes your experience so much faster!" That's why we need to keep upgrading stuff!

Support for this depends on the software. All browsers support it since about 2020. If you need image editor try Gimp, full support since 2018.

[thecoalman]

What are CDNs in a nutshell?
You mean lazy on the part of the browser's developpers, or the website administrators?
And what does curl do that the browser doesn't to actually fetch the origin JPG/PNG picture without that redirection?

A CDN or content delivery network specializes in delivering static content. So for example I use Cloudflare primarily for the traffic management but one of the tools they provide is "edge caching". When user makes request for page on my site they are directed to Cloudflare datacenter near them, they have hundreds of them across the globe. Images, CSS, .JS, video or audio is already cached at the data center so it only needs to make short travel to end user. This greatly reduces response times and server load at origin, the only thing I need to serve is HTML and only then because it's dynamic. They also have another tool for image optimization, never used it so I don't really know the nuts and bolts of how it works.

Lazy is the web developer that doesn't change the source code so the request is for correct file. If you have an infinite amount of images redirecting from .jpg to .webp versions is just a few lines in .htaccess file. Changing the source HTML is a bit more difficult.

As far as curl there is any number of reasons and I'm not going to try and analyze why. If it has .jpg extension and the extension is mismatched the browser may convert it to correct extension when you save. Curl isn't going to do that. That said now that I'm thinking about if the web developer converted to .webp and used .jpg extension they can use webp mime type in the response and it shouldn't break anything except the results you are seeing. This would avoid the CPU for redirecting.

Speaking of Reddit, while I'm at it: on such websites where there are many nested comments, some of which are hidden, some of which are only partially displayed, and one has to click on every single “+” or “See more comments” or “X more replies” or equivalent to load them all, then click on every single “See more” or equivalent to display the whole content{**}, in order to display everything there is to display before saving the page, is there any way to automate this stupidly tedious process?

They do this to preserve bandwidth, both for themselves and the users. Basically you JS script that dynamically loads more content into the page. You can try disabling JS, they may have fallback page that doesn't require clicking.

Conversely, are there ways to prevent a website from automatically loading extra content that is not part of the currently visited page?

If it's content not really, you can try playing around with NoScript but that's PITA for content you may want to see.

[Kakujitsu]

Have you tried spidering the website with said images and just looking through the dir for the files you want?
HTTrack Website Copier

[ozymango]

Support for this depends on the software. All browsers support it since about 2020.

Oh heck yeah, of course all browsers support it, that's what it's made for (webp), for faster browsing! The only reason anyone would care is because they're right-clicking on some image, to save it to their computer, for their purposes, and then it's "webp" and they try to read it in whatever outdated page layout software they're using (people still use MS Publisher these days, gads!) and then it don't work, and so yeah you need to update your stuff. But again we all know that, we're just grumbling back and forth because what else is there to talk about these days?

If you need image editor try Gimp, full support since 2018.

Like I said, I'm a Linux user, I love Gimp, I use Gimp, I love Kdenlive for video editing, and gthumb for basic image viewing and editing. But I do have Adobe Photoshop CS 6, in fact I have the entire Adobe Master Collection CS6, and that cost me $$$$$ even with my educational discount (I used to do tech support for a university), and it's completely outdated and not supported by Adobe, but it works fine for my purposes -- except it doesn't like webp files. Well there is a plugin (non-Adobe) that lets me import and export webp files, which is fine for me, but frankly when I edit photos or videos my preferred file formats are PSD, TIFF, PNG, and JPG, pretty much in that order. I don't mind using webp (or webm), but for my vintage workflows (i.e. I will keep using Windows software that works for what I need to do, even if it's no longer supported, because I paid for it, dammit) I just don't care to use webp.

But again I am saying this is a philosophical point, not a technical one -- there's all sorts of files and software out there that people like or don't like, and I wouldn't take an Apple product if you gave me one (well I'd take it and trade it for an Android product or some PC I can install Linux on), so this is definitely a moot point and you use what you like and have a great day!

[GAhere]

... But again I am saying this is a philosophical point, not a technical one -- ...

"Philosophically", you are stealing online photos or images when you decide to capture, download and save them for your purpose and or archiving without any compensation to the copyrighted material owners which is violating all copyrights of the owners of those photos or images.

Be very glad we are not still in the early days of the Internet when dialup modems were all you had and any pictures or images hosted on websites were not much more than a pixelated postage stamp and that would take an hr to download.

Oh how folks have gotten extremely spoiled, free photos and images the size of billboards within less than one second it is downloaded to your device with nearly no loss in details even with highly compressed image formats..

[abolibibelot]

Be very glad we are not still in the early days of the Internet when dialup modems were all you had and any pictures or images hosted on websites were not much more than a pixelated postage stamp and that would take an hr to download.

Oh yes indeed...
But it reminds me of a quite unusual bit by French humorist Pierre Desproges (known for his typically bleak and scathing sense of humor), who basically implied that he took more pleasure as a child listening to music on a crappy “Teppaz” portable record player he put on top of a tree, than as a fairly wealthy adult listening to music on a high-end hi-fi system in the comfort of his living room.

“When I was almost still a little boy, in the country, I waited until the summer night was very dark to set up the loudspeaker of my Teppaz at the top of the great lime tree, and I listened to La Notte{*} while counting the stars, lying in the grass, and waves of voluptuous sorrow ran over my skin, as when one is far from the loved one and it is heartrending for ordinary joys.
Today, I have a 2x100 Watts maxi-chain. As we grow, the ear gets more refined and the heart tightens.”
Pierre Desproges, Dictionnaire superflu à l'usage de l'élite et des bien nantis (1985) / DuckDuckGo translation with a few improvements

{*} Not sure, could be referring to the soundtrack of the 1961 movie by Michelangelo Antonioni. I thought that it was a famous piece of classical music – that bit is at the end of the “Vivaldi (Antonio)” in that otherwise mostly goofy dictionary – but can't find any with that title (only did a very cursory search). Please chime in if you think that it's most definitely something else.
Scratch that – there is indeed a piece called La Notte mentioned in the Wikipedia article on Antonio Vivaldi; it is supposed to be a bassoon concerto, labeled “RV 501”, yet if I search further I find a flute concerto, labeled “RV 439”... gee, that's so confusing... the more you know, the more you realize that you know next to nothing... In all likelihood, it refers to that piece which I vaguely recognize, and which I could very well imagine being played on top of a tree during a summer night.

And speaking of which, since I'm way off topic already, and it's my topic to begin with, that reminds me of a short broadcast from NPR I listened to a few years ago, about a book called 1000 recordings to hear before you die, which included a selection of records deemed particularly fitting for late summer nights, featuring: Ahmad Jamal, Sly and the Family Stone, Antonio Vivaldi (again), and Bruce Springsteen.

[thecoalman]

Be very glad we are not still in the early days of the Internet when dialup modems ....

I kind of miss waiting 4 hours for that 40MB IE4 download.

[GAhere]

Be very glad we are not still in the early days of the Internet when dialup modems ....

I kind of miss waiting 4 hours for that 40MB IE4 download.

Maybe you should have tried installing AOL "4.0" instead which was touted to "make all things better"


Unlimited AOL? Yeah right, after 4 PM weekdays and all weekend all you heard was the modem dialing and the failed handshake without ever getting connected to AOL and IF you were lucky, you might get connected for just enough time to view one email with the glorious AOL "goodby" disconnect before you could respond to the email.. Surfing the web, yeah right, might squeeze that in from 7 AM to 3 PM if you were lucky for a few minutes at a time..

I don't miss those days.

[ozymango]

"Philosophically", you are stealing online photos or images when you decide to capture, download and save them for your purpose and or archiving without any compensation to the copyrighted material owners which is violating all copyrights of the owners of those photos or images.

You should see my taped-from-somebody-else's-LP cassette tape and recorded-from-over-the-air-broadcasts Beta video collections.

Be very glad we are not still in the early days of the Internet when dialup modems were all you had and any pictures or images hosted on websites were not much more than a pixelated postage stamp and that would take an hr to download.

Hey, I think I still have my Intel 9600 baud external modem in a box somewhere! I started out with DOS 5.0 and a dial-up (2400 baud) modem to connect to a BBS, mostly I used it for email (PINE!) and they did have some cool services like Gopher, plus some ... uh ... photo "collections" that you had to pay extra for if you wanted to view them, as you had to vouch that you were over 18 ... dunno if the images were pixelated or not ...

Oh how folks have gotten extremely spoiled, free photos and images the size of billboards within less than one second it is downloaded to your device with nearly no loss in details even with highly compressed image formats..

I was the computer lab manager at Seattle University back in the 1990's, and we went from Windows 3.1 for Networks (came on I think 13 floppy disks) to Windows NT 4.0 one summer, and that was a heck of a fun migration ... also we went from Novell to Microsoft for networking, and Netscape was my personal favorite browser ... then we had a bit of a kerfluffle when kids would use the computer labs to download .mp3 files to play on Winamp, stealing music and all that ...

Good times, good times!

EDIT: Oh man almost forgot -- ALT newsgroups. Way before Facebook or Reddit or Slack or Discord or whatever is the cool chat site of the current times, there was ALT. Whatever subject you were interested in, there was an ALT group ... like

alt.conspiracy.black.helicopters

Does that date me, or what?

[thecoalman]

Maybe you should have tried installing AOL "4.0" instead which was touted to "make all things better"

Never had AOL, used Prodigy until switching until cable. Can't say there was eve an issue with connectivity, all 56kbps.

About 15 years ago I needed internet connection for just a few days so I opted for dial up just to get email and keep tabs on my sites. Most of the internet was useless.

[GAhere]

Hey, I think I still have my Intel 9600 baud external modem in a box somewhere! I started out with DOS 5.0 and a dial-up (2400 baud) modem to connect to a BBS, mostly I used it for email (PINE!) and they did have some cool services like Gopher, plus some ... uh ... photo "collections" that you had to pay extra for if you wanted to view them, as you had to vouch that you were over 18 ... dunno if the images were pixelated or not ...


I was the computer lab manager at Seattle University back in the 1990's, and we went from Windows 3.1 for Networks (came on I think 13 floppy disks) to Windows NT 4.0 one summer, and that was a heck of a fun migration ... also we went from Novell to Microsoft for networking, and Netscape was my personal favorite browser ... then we had a bit of a kerfluffle when kids would use the computer labs to download .mp3 files to play on Winamp, stealing music and all that ...

Good times, good times!

EDIT: Oh man almost forgot -- ALT newsgroups. Way before Facebook or Reddit or Slack or Discord or whatever is the cool chat site of the current times, there was ALT. Whatever subject you were interested in, there was an ALT group ... like

alt.conspiracy.black.helicopters

Does that date me, or what?

I got you by a longshot, pre "DOS", Pre IBM PC.. Started out playing with computers slightly before Atari 400/800, Commodore VIC 20/64, Timex Sinclair, TRS 80s Apple1 came out.. No floppies, no HDs, just cassette tape to save and restore programs and data before turning off and on.

Have worked with and setup early Novelle network servers (no GUI interface), Base net networks (first wired network protocols), Token Ring, ARCnet, Thin Net and Thicknet (early forms of what we know now as Ethernet but were based on RG-58 and RG8 coax) along with first versions of what we know as WiFi which was a blazing speed of 1 meg.. Done the DOS thing, Win NT 3.51 server up to 2016 Server, NT3.51 workstation, NT4.0 Workstation along the way..

All that was well before there was a job position called IT..

[ozymango]

I got you by a longshot, pre "DOS", Pre IBM PC.. Started out playing with computers slightly before Atari 400/800, Commodore VIC 20/64, Timex Sinclair, TRS 80s Apple1 came out.. No floppies, no HDs, just cassette tape to save and restore programs and data before turning off and on.

Cool! But what was your first VTR or VCR? Half-inch tape, Umatic, Beta, or VHS? And your first portable VCR and camera? And your first camcorder?

[cholla]

@ GAhere,
Was this your first computer ? :

[Attachment 91544 - Click to enlarge]

@ ozymango,
My first computer was a Commodore64 & I still have it.
My first VCR was a top loading Panasonic. IDK the model.
First camcorder was a large VHS RCA.
First camera a Kodak Brownie Hawkeye. Second hand.
My dad had a Kodak movie camera (film type) but I did not get to use it.No audio on his model.
Never had a portable VCR unless you count a regular settop VCR as portable.
Now I have a portable TV(has a tuner) with a DVD player. The whole thing about the size of a laptop PC
Looks like one too.

[ozymango]

@ GAhere,
Was this your first computer ?

I wish!

@ ozymango,
My first computer was a Commodore64 & I still have it.

Mine was a Tandy 1000 EX, with the optional upgraded 640K of memory. Ran some special flavor of "Tandy DOS," which I didn't mind so much when I first got it, but trying to run anything but Radio Shack branded software on it was pretty hit-and-miss. Dual 5.25" floppies! Monochrome monitor! Dot-matrix printer (can't remember the make) that I can still hear ringing in my ears today!

My first VCR was a top loading Panasonic. IDK the model.

Mine was an RCA, front-loading, you had to set the channels by tuning a little Philips-head plastic screw for each of the 13 channels on the faceplate. That is, you could tune to any VHF or UHF channel, but there were only 13 selections on the tuner, if that made any sense. And wired remote!

First camcorder was a large VHS RCA.

I had a portable VCR (Panasonic) and a Newvicon-tubed video camera to go with it for my first "camcorder." The portable VCR's battery would last about half-an-hour, so I got an external lead-acid battery pack, about the size of a motorcycle battery, to power it "in the field," so to speak. The whole setup only weighed 30 lbs! My first actual camcorder was a Canon 8mm video camcorder, man that was one sweet camcorder. I gave it to my brother-in-law for Christmas one year, I think I "upgraded" to a mini-DV camera at that point.

First camera a Kodak Brownie Hawkeye. Second hand.

I got a Kodak 110 pocket camera for Christmas when I was 12, that was my official first camera. But the first camera I ever paid any serious $$$ for was my beloved Minolta XG-M, which was the first time I ever bought any actual "top of the line" camera, really top-of-the line anything, back in ... 1981? Bloody expensive, but great camera. I sold it to my friend Leon when I "upgraded" to a Nikon FE2. That Nikon was my favorite camera ever, just in terms of being such a lovely work of engineering. It was stolen out of my car in Portland, OR when I was visiting family many years ago.

My dad had a Kodak movie camera (film type) but I did not get to use it.No audio on his model.

My dad had a regular 8mm movie camera, Bell + Howell, the exact same model Abraham Zapruder had! It was a great camera, had slow-motion and still-frame animation, and he let me use it and frankly I got into film making (even went to film school at San Jose State for a while, back in the 80's) because of my love of making movies on my dad's movie camera. I still have it! It doesn't quite work any more, the automatic light-meter went out, but the motor works (you hand-wind it) but you can't get regular 8mm film anymore, rats.

Never had a portable VCR unless you count a regular settop VCR as portable.
Now I have a portable TV(has a tuner) with a DVD player. The whole thing about the size of a laptop PC
Looks like one too.

I already mentioned my portable VCR and camera, I still have the camera but the VCR died a long time ago (video heads failed, had a repair quote of $800, this was back in 1988, ouch!).

Does my phone (Samsung Android) count as a portable TV?

Thanks for the fun time going back down memory lane!

[cholla]

My dads movie camera eventually failed. He just threw it away.
Then my grandmother won an Argus super 8 movie camera.
My dad took some videos with it but never had them developed.
I still have those but also never had them developed.
I do have some 8mm that were developed but I do not have a working projector.
I plan to have them digitilized & the make some units just for this.
They run about $260.00 or more.
A person can setup a telecine converter box cheaper but the all in one units look better.

I have a Cannon Photura 35mm regular film camera but it has been mothballed a long time.
It takes really good pictures.
Now my main camera is a Fuji XP140.It does video also but for some reason the video is limited to 14 minuter.
I can start a new video as soon as it stops because the sd card can hold several 14 minute videos.

I guess any cell phone can count as a TV or better a video player..
The portable TV I have has a 13.5" screen though & can receive OTA channels.
It has a USB rechargeable battery.
My top loading Panasonic had the same type tuner adjustment as you RCA with only 13 channels.

I still have both a single & a dual floppy drive for the Commodore 64.
I also have 5.25 games for it as well a several game cartridges.
I still hook it up & play them sometimes.

[GAhere]

I got you by a longshot, pre "DOS", Pre IBM PC.. Started out playing with computers slightly before Atari 400/800, Commodore VIC 20/64, Timex Sinclair, TRS 80s Apple1 came out.. No floppies, no HDs, just cassette tape to save and restore programs and data before turning off and on.

Cool! But what was your first VTR or VCR? Half-inch tape, Umatic, Beta, or VHS? And your first portable VCR and camera? And your first camcorder?

I didn't own but first job out of Tech school I got to play with a lot of professional broadcast equipment..

Full editing suite for a large well known company, Sony 1" VTRs rackmounted, 3/4" Sony VTRs rackmounted and several portables, they had one main editing suite with two smaller editing suites which only had 3/4 Sony Umatics plus audio editing suite featuring 4 channel profession TEAC R to Rs, Tascam 32 channel mixer, rack mount cassette and to round that out a Thorens turntable.. They had much more than what I can remember..


Camcorder?

No, lugable separate camera/VTR..

Did buy a VHS and have owned a few Betas, Betas are gone and have a couple of Sony High 8 editing decks and a High 8 Sony camcorder..

Yeah, I am a dinosaur..