Had To Guess

I recently had to upload a photograph to a website for a photographic ID pass thing. I had already cropped the digital image to upload and then I noticed the website’s insistence that the photograph be <=40kB. Now, that’s not very big at all, especially when you consider that my cropped photo was about 150kB. So I resized the picture until it was just below 40kB. Then I uploaded it.

But.

Nope. The dimensions were incorrect! The photo had to be between 3.5 and 4.5 cm tall. Now, I ask you what does this mean? I’d already got the photograph to be within the correct size with respect to data but now I had to make sure it was the correct size in terms of cm. But, it depends how many dots per inch you are using. There was no information about the dpi the photocard people were using. It just had to be guessed!

Who does that these days? Who specifies a “paper size” for an image when you upload it? This was a classically terrible piece of web design made for bureaucrats who don’t understand what your average person understands about images and sizes. It was crazy. Do they not have an algorithm to just print the image to a particular size depending on the largest dimension? It was a frustrating ten minutes messing around with uploading files and cropping images along with resizing the image. What started off as a good detail photograph ended up almost pixelated.