Project creation page does not accept GIF icons

Bug Reports
1

Please fill out the following sections to the best of your ability, it will help us investigate bugs if we have this information at the outset. Screenshots are especially helpful, so please provide those if you can.

Platform (Android, iOS, Website): website

App version number, if a mobile app issue (shown under Settings or About):

Browser, if a website issue (Firefox, Chrome, etc) : Firefox

URLs (aka web addresses) of any relevant observations or pages: https://www.inaturalist.org/projects/new

Screenshots of what you are seeing (instructions for taking a screenshot on computers and mobile devices: https://www.take-a-screenshot.org/):
Instructions:
Screenshot from 2021-11-27 19-01-18
Results:

Screenshot from 2021-11-27 19-02-24
Screenshot from 2021-11-27 19-02-24708Ă—250 14.1 KB

Description of problem (please provide a set of steps we can use to replicate the issue, and make as many as you need.):

Contrary to the statement on the project creation page that project icons can be JPG, PNG, or GIF, selecting a GIF image results in an error message saying only JPG or PNG are allowed. Just a minor mismatch between instructions and actual behavior.

Step 1: Start a new project.

Step 2: Select a GIF project icon file (instructions say "PNG, JPG, or GIF), continue filling out project info.

Step 3: Click “Done” – results in error message saying “Icon must be JPG or PNG”.

Easy workaround: convert icon image to PNG.

Suggested solution: Remove “or GIF” from the instructions for the Project Icon section of the page to make it consistent with actual behavior of the page.

1 Like
2

Just a suggestion, unless you really need the image to be a non-rectangular shape, convert yo JPG/JPEG instead. Generally speaking PNG files are much larger than JPG files of the same resolution (often same with GIF as well). For the purposes of conserving storage it’s best to avoid those two formats unless you have a specific need for them.

3

I may have seen something like this. The solution is to make sure that the GIF image size is the same as the one listed as the optimal size.
image

If this is done the GIF will upload.

4

just out of curiosity’s sake, I’d like to see a project with a GIF icon!

5

Ok I was taking a look and I get the same message FOR THE ICON. The banner can work as a GIF if the suggestions above are used.

6

Not true. For line drawings, PNG provides quite good lossless compression, while JPEG will fuzz-up the line boundaries. For the icon I was using (117x118 pixels, high contrast line drawing with text), the original GIF was 3.4 kB, PNG was 3.7 kB, and JPG (saved at quality 90) was 8.5 kB. My general rule is PNG for line drawings, JPEG for photographs. For an icon-size image, I don’t think file size will matter much, anyway.

1 Like
7

I was making the assumption that by images something like photos were being talked about.

If you’re dealing specifically with vector art and text, then PNG keeps clean lines and scalability better.

2 Likes
11

You should be able to upload a GIF for your project icon now, although animated ones won’t be animated on the site. We also changed the banner image rules and now only accept JPEG and PNG files for the banner.

12

Yes, works now. Thanks for the rapid fix.

1 Like