I spent an entire weekend fighting with resolution settings for a Jeju photo dump

Spending way too long on file compression

I really thought resizing photos for a blog post wouldn’t be this soul-crushing. Last year, I took a bunch of photos during a trip to Jeju Island. They were mostly shot on a mirrorless camera, so the file sizes were massive—like 20MB per shot. Trying to upload them to a basic platform felt like watching paint dry. I spent hours opening them up in Adobe Photoshop, trying to find that sweet spot between ‘this looks decent’ and ‘this won’t crash the server.’ I kept going back and forth on whether to export as JPEGs or try to get fancy with newer formats. In the end, I just stuck with standard JPEG exports because I didn’t want to spend another two hours testing browser compatibility. It was one of those tasks that feels like you’re being productive, but then you realize it’s just digital housekeeping that nobody will ever notice.

Trying to fix my own amateur editing mistakes

There was this one photo of a beach I really liked, but the horizon line was slightly crooked. It’s so annoying when you see it once and can’t unsee it. I tried using Lightroom Classic to straighten it, but then the crop left me with this weird empty space in the corner. I had to use the generative fill tools to patch it up, which I’m still not entirely sure I trust. It’s strange how we now rely on AI to ‘guess’ what the sand or the sky looked like beyond the frame. Sometimes it works perfectly, and other times it adds a weird, smudge-like texture that looks like a cheap painting. I think I paid around $10 for a monthly subscription to keep these tools running, which feels like a lot for someone who just wanted to fix a few vacation shots. The constant subscription updates and new AI feature prompts every time I open the app are getting a bit old, honestly.

The messy reality of AI image manipulation

I’ve been hearing a lot about how tools like Google’s latest AI models or ChatGPT can handle image editing now. People talk about them as if they’re going to replace traditional software entirely, but my experience has been pretty hit-or-miss. I tried to use an AI tool to remove a stray tourist who was sitting in the background of a shot near a coffee shop. It removed the person, sure, but it also accidentally blurred out the shop sign in a way that looked like a bad lens distortion. I spent another thirty minutes trying to fix the ‘fix.’ It’s faster, maybe, but it doesn’t really save you the trouble of having to double-check everything. I almost wish I’d just left the tourist in there. It would have looked more like a real memory, anyway.

Comparing the effort to just leaving things alone

I think back to when I used to just dump photos onto a hard drive and never look at them again. Was that better? Maybe not, but it was certainly less stressful. Now there’s this pressure to make everything look ‘optimized’—to have the right aspect ratios for mobile screens, to have the correct DPI, to ensure the files are compressed enough to load quickly. I spent about three full afternoons last week doing nothing but these minor adjustments. I could have been reading a book or actually going out to take new photos. Sometimes I wonder if we’re all just spending our time ‘polishing’ things that were fine in their original state. There’s a specific kind of fatigue that comes from staring at pixels until they all start looking the same, and I’m definitely feeling that right now. I still haven’t finished uploading the whole gallery from the trip. Maybe I’ll get to it next weekend, or maybe I’ll just leave them sitting in a folder on my desktop for another six months.