Straightforward mountains are popular mountains. And on a sunny summer’s day don’t expect to have the mountain to yourself. This is the traffic jam of roped parties taking aspirant climbers up the Allalinhorn, and this is quite possibly their first 4,ooo metre Alpine peak. And I certainly don’t begrudge any of them their first summit. After all this was my very first summit aged fifteen although in those days it was climbed by a different and longer route from the Britannia Hut.
Today it is a half day snow climb from the top station of the Metro Alpin cog railway. In summer it is also a popular spot for summer skiing on the Allalin glacier.
I am noticing that images now posted to WordPress appear to have reduced brightness compared to the original JPEG. Are you also noticing the same problem? Something has changed and it is very obvious in today’s image – the whites look particularly dull to me.
LensScaper 
I must admit, I haven’t been paying a lot of attention…..
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I’ve heard people fussing about this. I did some looking, and discovered that WordPress has been re-compressing jpg images to 90%, and now are compressing for mobile to 82%. Apparently there are fixes for this if you’re using the self-hosted WordPress.org templates. What I don’t know is if there’s a way to achieve the same thing on WP.com. it may be possible if the CSS upgrade is purchased — I just don’t know.
I don’t upload my photos to the WordPress galleries, but use an ftp server. I don’t know if they are automatically compressed when I insert them. Since I link directly to the server for my enlargements, I don’t think any compression takes place there. But I don’t know, because I truly don’t know much about all this. But I need to find out.
If you have another, non-WP site where you could upload a photo, I think you could figure out pretty quickly if it’s WP’s compression causing the problem.
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Oh — and this might be helpful. I know thesacredpath: he’s quite knowledgeable.
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Thanks for that information, Linda, in your two emails. I usually upload an image larger than the width of the blog so that viewers can click on the image and see a larger, and usually, higher quality version. I think I may stop doing that to reduce the risk of images being mangled by the compression software that WP is using.
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This is a great capture, nevertheless.
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Thanks very much for your comment, Dina, and welcome to my blog. I believe we have a mutual friend – Adrian.
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Hi Andy, I guess it’s inevitable that WordPress will seek to compress images increasingly aggressively, we all know that memory costs money. I hadn’t noticed an issue with brightness with my last post. I always post at 1200 x 800 at 12 quality jpeg and often mention that a sharper clearer picture can be viewed by clicking on the image. As I said, I really didn’t notice a deficit with my last post but perhaps this has happened in the last few days. I think this is a lovely image and can understand your disappointment if the whites are not what they should be. However, it is a superb image.
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Thank you Adrian. In landscape mode I post images at 1500 across, for portrait mode they are limited to 1000 tall. I will monitor this and see if the problem persists. Many thanks for your kind comments.
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There is a first for everything and for everybody, no! Sometimes it’s annoying to have rookies in the way, but we need to have some patience for the next generation of whatever it is. I really like this photo. Great composition and lights. It does seem a little gray in the highlights, but for me it just added a feeling of time gone by. Personally I haven’t noticed any changes in the uploading of images to WordPress, but I will check it out. Enjoy your mountain experience, Andy.
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Thanks Otto. Yes, we were all beginners once! On nice crisp compacted snow, when the crampons bite, it’s straightforward to step off the beaten track and go by them. Guides and their clients are sometimes the worst at barging their way through.
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What a superb photo Andy…those climbers stand out so well against the whites of the snow. What a fantastic place to see 🙂
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Many thanks SP. Some of my best memories are of being in places like this.
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