How Real Estate Portals Silently Degrade Listing Photos During Resizing
When listing photos are processed by real estate portals, default settings in image libraries like Sharp (Node.js/libvips) can subtly reduce visual quality without any bugs occurring. Key operations — resizing, recompression, and format conversion — each carry hidden defaults that affect the final image, such as JPEG output defaulting to 4:2:0 chroma subsampling, which discards three-quarters of colour data. Sharp also strips all metadata and ICC colour profiles by default, silently converting images shot in Adobe RGB to sRGB. Different formats like AVIF, WebP, and JPEG each use different chroma defaults, meaning a single hardcoded pipeline assumption will produce incorrect results for at least two of the three. Developers at CasaNova Labs, an AI real estate editing studio, documented these behaviours directly from Sharp's API reference to highlight where pipeline defaults diverge from what photographers and portals may expect.
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