Re: Replacing the animal photos in the ‘erase’ activities

[Timothée Giet]

Le 20/02/2022 à 15:21, Karl Ove Hufthammer a écrit :
> Hi!
>
> I have some comments and questions about the animal photos in the
> ‘erase’ activity.
>
> While they might have been OK in the 800 × 600 era, IMHO they don’t
> look good on modern hardware (high screen resolutions and large
> monitors). They are all in low resolution (800 × 520) and look bad
> when scaled to fullscreen. In addition, several were blurry to begin
> with, and some of them have been stretched so that they don’t even
> have the original aspect ratio.
>
> Would you mind if I replaced them with some new/better ones?
>
> I’m thinking of looking for some nice ones (either beautiful, cute or
> funny), preferably with shallow depth of field (blurry background).
> And then cropping and resizing them to 1920 × 1080. This is a very
> common resolution and aspect ratio, and the resolution is high enough
> that the images should look good even when resized to higher
> resolutions (e.g., 4k).
>
> Comments?
>
> And which licenses are acceptable?
>
Hi Karl,

The issue with changing those photos, or why I didn't do it already, is
that replacing those photos with high resolution ones will take much
more storage space for sure. And as we are already close to the size
limit for apks on the play store, we need to be careful with adding more
big files. I've fought a lot during the last few years to always reduce
the size of assets when updating them to progressively make room for new
activities, and avoided as much as possible big changes like these that
would increase a lot the app size. In the future when we'll switch to
aab instead of apk, we will have a bit more room to add some big files
like these, but I prefer to delay this as much as possible as it will
also require newer Qt that will make the packages not compatible anymore
with some still-used Android versions (that will happen anyway at some
point, but the later the better), and even then still it should be done
cautiously to also leave room for new activities content...

Else, one thing that could be done for now is to replace the images with
fewer ones of in 1920*1080, taking care that the total size doesn't
increase much compared to current ones (that is around 5.4Mio).

About licenses, the best would be photos in Creative Commons CC-BY or
CC-0, or else CC-BY-SA 4.0.

Timothée