Photo is getting worse with the time

[AutoImport-stefan-niedermann]

I have a curious problem. I am using latest DavDroid from F-Droid Repo and latest OwnCloud (but it happend with older OwnCloud and DavDroid-Versions, too).

After some time i notice on some images the quality is getting worse and worse. And every time it gets an tinge of green.

I’m afraid i can not surely say it’s caused by DavDroid or OwnCloud and it does not happen with all of the pictures, but always with the same pictures (i sometimes replace the broken images with “fresh” ones because it looks ugly…)

Do you have any idea if it’s possibly caused by DavDroid? Here is the Correspondenting issue in OwnCloud Contacts: https://github.com/owncloud/contacts/issues/919

This is a broken example picture:

Notice: It’s not broken within a second, but every day the picture looses quality. After some days or weeks, it looks like this.

Hopefull, you can help me.

[rfc2822]

Is this the same issue as #296?

[AutoImport-stefan-niedermann]

yeah, possible. but this issue seems to be closed, so why do i still have the problem?

[AutoImport-untitaker]

@stefan-niedermann It’s still not clear whether ownCloud has fully fixed this issue, or if it is caused by Android or DavDroid.

Could you check whether swapping any component with an alternative (Radicale instead of ownCloud, CardDAV-Sync instead of DavDroid) fixes this issue? Which ROM are you using?

[AutoImport-stefan-niedermann]

I am using Paranoid Android 4.4. Well, swapping all components will cost very much time. I will try to find some minutes/hours, but i can not promise that this happens soon…

[AutoImport-untitaker]

It seems Flock (which is IIRC a fork of DavDroid) has a commit related to this: https://github.com/WhisperSystems/Flock/commit/958a76e4f629cf8393722198822fc83033f0cc08

[rfc2822]

@untitaker The skip_processing field which is used in this commit looks interesting.

[devvv4ever]

is this maybe related to https://github.com/owncloud/contacts/issues/994 ?

[Natanji]

There hasn’t been progress on this as it seems, but I am having this problem too. For some (not all!) of my contacts, especially those which I call a lot, the image quality degrades over time. I am using Horde 5.2.10 with DAVdroid to 0.8.4.1 on a OnePlus One with Android 5.1.1 (Cyanogenmod).

The images don’t look as badly as in the entry post (can’t post them for privacy reasons, sorry), but results that look pretty much like it are reproducible by taking a JPEG file and just re-compressing it. At each of the compression steps, the image will become “blockier” and get more of a tint of color.

So to me this looks as if DAVdroid is downloading the image from the server, and then upon syncing (maybe because something else in the contact got updated?) it re-compresses the image, thereby degrading quality, instead of just uploading it as-is. Could that be what’s happening?

[rfc2822]

@Natanji said:

There hasn’t been progress on this as it seems, but I am having this problem too. For some (not all!) of my contacts, especially those which I call a lot, the image quality degrades over time. I am using Horde 5.2.10 with DAVdroid to 0.8.4.1 on a OnePlus One with Android 5.1.1 (Cyanogenmod).

I’m using DAVdroid on Android 5.1.1 (Cyanogenmod) with Radicale at the moment.

So to me this looks as if DAVdroid is downloading the image from the server, and then upon syncing (maybe because something else in the contact got updated?) it re-compresses the image, thereby degrading quality, instead of just uploading it as-is. Could that be what’s happening?

No. You can look into the DAVdroid source code:

• when downloading a raw contact photo, it puts the photo into the PHOTO blob;
• when uploading a raw contact photo, it takes the high-res photo from the Contact provider.