Seriously, it used to be that uploading .PNG would produce a nice crisp picture. No longer. This seems like a big issue to me, can it be fixed or something?

Yeah I would like to see this fixed as well. +1

I want it back too.

I agree

Yeah it's not even worth looking at many shots because of the quality. But on the other hand my quality is nowhere near perfect and I do have some bad quality shots on my page from earlier times

the problem is people who have a 90+ quality score have their pics automatically uploaded.

My reply is quite a technical one.

PNG is lossless. And generally not ideal for big photos published online because of file's size.

We use quite a small image size to display photos. Because of the site's layout.
There were cases when our images weighted about 1Mb after downsizing, which is inappropriate for smth. like 640x480, which we use. It's just too much.
Loads slow (not for everyone, but for many), eats tons of server's bandwith and storage. Not a surprise, though, it's png.

So we turned to JPEG here. And once your image is more or less good, the resulting
image will be good as well. Good _enough_ to be viewed online.

Well, here we have a comparison: PNG compared to JPEG

So, that's it. We just can't post huge images to gain a bit (not a tons of) sharpness.

And while it's not a priority for now, we have smth. like "see raw image" feature
planned.

That explains it...

I save all my pics now in JPEG. I am happy with the results :)

You don't admit that it was a bug that JPG's were re-sized to 50kb, but PNG's got through without any re-sizing? I did some research sometime ago about this, and asked you via PM, never got any answers, and not too long from that PNG re-sizing started working.

It's not that much the 'sharpness', its the compression artifacts. Because the compression level is so high that the picture starts to lose information which causes those artifacts.

I don't admit that. There were no bugs with resizing. Jpegs were resized to jpeg and their size was OK. PNGs were resized (yes!) to png's, but their size was NOT OK. Not a bug, it all was known from scratch. So, now pngs are converted to jpegs and resulting size IS OK.

We DO NOT resize to achive 50k file size, we DO resize to achive needed image size, like 640x480. And if 640x480 weight is almost 1Mb - it is NOT OK for us. That's it.

PS: I've seen your message. I get lots of messages every day, and not always enough time to respond.

What I was trying to say..
With PNG and JPEG we are choosing between

1) keeping a bit more quality but live with large (too large, unfortunately) file sizes (png)
2) losing a bit of quality yet gain a significant file size reduction (jpeg).

2nd way has been chosen.

i wish there was another way i think the quality difference is pretty big

Are the pictures previously uploaded in .png still viewable in .png???