Just a little rant about screenshot resizing... sorry :(

[TheTabman]

I have a very hard time understanding the motivation behind taking a 256x224 screenshot from the NES, blowing it up to 1280x720 (including black bars on the sides even though it's stretched anyway) with a terrible softening filter, and to compensate then add way too much sharpening, and then save it as a 25kb JPG with so much compression that it's hard to recognize anything in it. Yes, 256x224 is tiny on a modern monitor. But why not just resize the image without any filter, effectively just making the pixels larger? Irfanview is great for that, it has batch-resizing and it's even free!

[CADScott]

I 100% agree! For me the screenshots for games should be in the original resolution of the game, and any resized or manipulated images should be rejected as a screenshot in the database. There is no need to resize the image at all, this can be done in LaunchBox and BigBox when it is viewed if desired, and it make the images much smaller for storage and actually an accurate picture of what the game will look like.

[Jason Carr]

100% agree. Screenshots should be exactly how they were taken and never blown up. I'm on the fence whether we should be rejecting screenshot contributions that are blown up (especially if there are no other screenshots for the game), but ideally, yeah, I agree.

[CADScott]

I feel we should reject incorrectly sized and "cleaned up" screenshots, even if there is no other screenshot available. If we allow poor quality images in now, then we will have to spend more time fixing them up later. Also if there is no image shown, then it is easy for someone to see that something is missing rather than having to examine the image to confirm it's quality.

[SentaiBrad]

Yes we should reject extremely blurry images for any section, except for Front Box Art because that may be all there is, and in which case... what are we gonna do? Screenshots have no room to stand on. Even if you didn't want to resize them. Open RetroArch, turn on the Pixellate x5 shader, make the window x4 or x5 and start taking screenshots. 4:3 games (pretty much everything from the GameCube era and back, with the exception of late in that generation) should not be in widescreen anyways! These games are not 16:9. So screenshots have seriously no excuse. GIMP and Irfanview are free with Nearest Neighbor scaling. Let's not forget a lot of users have Photoshop too and that certainly has a Nearest Neighbor scaling. Forgetting that, taking screenshots is super super super super easy and you can do that with a clean crisp look at any 4:3 resolution, given your monitor is big enough.

[Jason Carr]

Ah, that is a good point. Rejecting poor quality images does encourage people to contribute new ones.

[Jason Carr]

Good points @SentaiBrad. Screenshots are relatively easy to take and should be easy enough to get right. Box art may be different.

[SentaiBrad]

Jason Carr said Good points @SentaiBrad. Screenshots are relatively easy to take and should be easy enough to get right. Box art may be different.

I get them from time to time. :P

[RiftCreeper]

Jason Carr said Good points @SentaiBrad. Screenshots are relatively easy to take and should be easy enough to get right. Box art may be different.

Agreed. Seeing anti-aliasing when screenshots or sprites are enlarged is infuriating. Any re-sizing should be scaled 1:1 with hard edges to preserve that retro pixelated look. Any scanned/camera images such as box art are the exception in which any picture is a good one in my book because some box art is extremely hard to come by.