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I'm having this little problem where I want to add images on a question or answer straight from a PS4, but the files are over 2MB in size.

Take for example this question about NFS Payback Stance Tuning and this answer for the Screenshot of the Week contest, where the original files straight out of the PS4 are over 2MB in size (#1 is Answer with 3.8MB, #2 is Question with 2.1MB):

enter image description here

To upload them and meet the 2MB image upload limit, I exported them as JPEG from Photoshop, but this is a bit overkill for adding a single image into a question or answer.

enter image description here

What is the best way to upload screenshots straight out a PS4?

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  • have you tried tinypng? i generally see a reduction of 70%-80% from most sources though i have not try PS4 images
    – Memor-X
    Commented Dec 7, 2019 at 14:09
  • Like the answer said, cropping is sometimes simple enough. If you don't need the full image to convey what it is you are asking or to convey an answer, crop it out. I've done it many times to cut down on the image size when uploading to the site. Straight up get rid of them pixels you don't need! Even a minor amount of cropping could help you get below the 2MB limit. Your ~2100KB file could probably be cropped just a tad to make it below the limit for example.
    – Timmy Jim Mod
    Commented Dec 9, 2019 at 14:44

2 Answers 2

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Honestly, screenshots like that full of photorealistic 3D scenery should be JPEG, unless you absolutely need to preserve every single pixel 100% accurately. (If you do need 100% pixel accuracy in a particular area, cropping out that one area is an option.)

Of course, that doesn't really answer your question of how to best (convert and) upload such screenshots. For that, there are several options:

  1. Depending on your OS (and desktop environment), it may already come with an image format converter built in. For example, the built-in Preview application on MacOS has a "File > Export…" menu option that can save an image in a bunch of formats, including JPEG:

    Screenshot of a screenshot being converted to JPEG in MacOS Preview application

    On Windows, plain old MS Paint can do the job, although it apparently doesn't let you choose the compression level.

  2. One option is to download and install an image format converter. There are lots of them floating around, but one multi-platform freeware option that keeps coming up in my searches (which, admittedly, could be just good promotion and SEO) is XnConvert. I haven't personally used it, but I expect that it will probably do the job.

  3. You could also download and install a free full-fledged image editor and use it to convert your images. GIMP is one well established option, but some people find its multi-window user interface unintuitive. For a more modern and polished choice, I would recommend trying Krita. Both are free and open source and available for Windows, MacOS and Linux. For Windows, Paint.NET (freeware, not open source) is also a popular choice. AFAIK, all of them can handle the simple job of converting PNG to JPEG just fine.

  4. Finally, if you just want to quickly convert a couple of screenshots without installing anything, and don't happen to have any convenient built-in converter available, you could use an online converter. Some of them, like png2jpg.com, require you to upload the PNG to their server and then download the JPEG version again, consuming time and bandwidth. But nowadays there are also fully client-side converters like https://onlinejpgtools.com/convert-png-to-jpg that will do the conversion process using JavaScript code in your browser without having to upload anything.

Of course, ideally, Stack Exchange would incorporate such a JS-based image format converter directly into their image upload dialog. But I'm not holding my breath for that to happen any time soon.

(It could be a possible future feature for SOUP, but to be honest, I haven't really had that much time or motivation to update it lately either. That said, I do take pull requests…)

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I found it's easier for me to just share to some integrated social network and then insert picture using direct link from it. Previously it was possible with Facebook or Twitter, now I can only see Twitter option.

Pros:

  • No need to use any usb stick;
  • Quality is automatically reduced to some jpeg.

Cons:

  • Maintaining one extra account;
  • Quality is automatically reduced to some jpeg.

If I need additional cropping I just use Windows 10 built-in Cropping Tool or Mac OS X cmd+shift+4 hotkey.

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