Can I keep Coppermine from changing the original file?

[Templarart]

This is a related two part question.

1) I have one user who has gone back to using Imageshack instead of my Coppermine based gallery because he says the quality of his image gets degraded in Coppermine.  I checked and he was right that his 512K image didn't change when uploaded to Imageshack but was cut down to nearly half in Coppermine.

2) I have another user who wants to share her .gif movie files but Coppermine seems to strip the .gif and leave it as a single image.  We've worked out a clunky system where she emails me her finished .gif and I upload it to userfiles but this seems completely unnecessary.

Is there some way to have Coppermine NOT change the original image while uploading it to the server?  I've checked the settings and tried a couple Coppermine galleries but can't figure it out.

Any help would be appreciated.  Thanks! 

[Joachim Müller]

Coppermine doesn't interfere with the originals if you instruct it accordingly - see corresponding config options. For details, post details: a link to your gallery and a non-admin test user account with upload privileges might be a good start.

1) I have one user who has gone back to using Imageshack instead of my Coppermine based gallery because he says the quality of his image gets degraded in Coppermine.  I checked and he was right that his 512K image didn't change when uploaded to Imageshack but was cut down to nearly half in Coppermine.

Sure, if you resize the images: jpeg of course is not lossless. Every resizing will degrade quality.

2) I have another user who wants to share her .gif movie files but Coppermine seems to strip the .gif and leave it as a single image.  We've worked out a clunky system where she emails me her finished .gif and I upload it to userfiles but this seems completely unnecessary.

Using GIFs is not a bright idea - she should use PNG instead, which features transparency as well. For movies, use an actual movie format like Flash, avi or wmf. Another option would be not to resize those images. The image libraries that coppermine is relying on (GD or ImageMagick) don't support GIF movies, so any resizing will result in loss of the movie and will only leave the initial frame of the movie.

[Templarart]

Thanks a lot - you helped me find the problem.

Sure, if you resize the images: jpeg of course is not lossless. Every resizing will degrade quality.

Right, but remember my problem was that Coppermine wasn't uploading the pics directly to the server - it was degrading them first.  So if Frank were to upload a 512K file, his "original" on the server would be 268K instead of the original 512K

What I did to fix it was choose:

Files and thumbnails settings
Auto resize images that are larger than max width or height  - changed to NO.

My max width and height is 2048, max upload size is 1280K and his pics NEVER came close to that (1470x980, 512K) so I just ignored this.  In fact the pic in question wasn't changed in size, just degraded in quality from 512K to 268K.  I thought I'd just be counter-intuitive, switch it off, try it out and BLAM - the pic uploads at 512K!

This kind of seems like a bug to me but now that my problem is solved - I'm fine.  Thanks!

[Joachim Müller]

This kind of seems like a bug to me but now that my problem is solved - I'm fine.  Thanks!

Not a bug, but expected behaviour. In fact, it's a feature.