Problems with: 1) hosting offsite banners & 2) efficiently uploading images here:

First of all, thanks Ella & crew for clearing up Lemm.ee's recent image-hosting issues! 🤘

Unfortunately, I note that there are still several post images I uploaded here that went missing ~2 months ago and never did get restored. Some examples: [1], [2], [3].

Whatever. I'll just move them over to Imgur.

As a matter of fact, at this point I'd rather just host everything at Imgur so as not to burden LE with images, which can frankly get pretty big at times. But that's where I just now noticed a seemingly big problem with how LE processes image uploads:

• I noticed that the original 95k community banner which I uploaded a long time ago was turned in to a significantly worse-quality WEBP file at around 250% the size of the original.

• In my attempt today to completely move the banner over to Imgur, I uploaded a higher-quality link today, then noticed the same issues. Also, it seems the banner file got moved over to LE (against my intent) and bloated to ~440k for you folks. Not what I intended, and seemingly not good.

So to recount: whatever process is currently handling image uploads seems to be 1) needlessly re-saving them as less-efficient WEBP's, 2) reducing their overall quality, and 3) the software is forcing all logo & banner content to be hosted at the local instance rather than offering the choice of being hosted elsewhere.