If you need to crop black border, it is better to capture in PNG, remove borders, then either save to JPEG (if you can set the compression/quality level) or keep the PNG and let the site do the compression.

To remove the borders, I use XnView, so I can do a batch-update of the images and remove the borders on all of them at once (I check on one image what are the coordinates of the useful part, and then I crop & resize all pics with the same parameters).

PS: I've split the discussion from the "Site updates" thread, as this was not really related to it.

I had thought about cropping the black edges in Paint and saving them directly as jpegs, but from what you say, would this cause the images to lose even more quality?

Usually I do captures in PNG and convert them myself to JPEG (while removing black borders), but if you capture directly to JPEG it is less good if you don't have compression options in your capture program.

Thank you very much for your explanation. I think I will shoot the next film I upload directly in JPEG to see the result.

Of course there is a quality loss since JPEG is a "destructive" compression vs PNG which is lossless But it takes way too many space for photos with lossless compression.

You can either send PNG and let the site encode them to JPEG, or encode them yourself to JPEG: in that case, you should set 86% quality and enable interlacing (that's what the site uses). That quality may seem low, but it is for two reasons: reasonable disk space use, and maybe avoiding complain from copyright holders if images are too high quality (both are also a reason for not having full HD images).

If images submitted are not compressed enough, the site will re-compress them, inducing probably a little more quality loss.
When the picture had to be recompressed, it is mentioned in the picture upload window (in the green message).

If you send PNG there will be normally no more loss than if you encode them yourself to JPG, except if your program does it better than what the site does (using PHP's libs). I didn't make a comparison about that.

Hello! This is my first time using this forum. You see, I've noticed that the only way to upload images to imcdb is through jpg files. In my latest uploads, I've uploaded PNG images that have been automatically converted to JPG. Is it advisable to download JPG images directly, or does it not matter? I ask because I've noticed a noticeable loss of quality from PNG to JPG images.