1) Although the site serves up images at 1024 pixels (or whatever) today, in the future they may want larger images. When everyone is rocking 10K monitors and 6K phone displays, those small images are going to look pretty bad.
2) The original image has some metadata that they want to keep (geolocation, etc).
3) They think they can do a better and more consistent job resizing than the various browsers, which is probably true.
agree on 3) most browsers just use linear interpolation when resizing images, which makes sense from a performance point of view, but looks terrible.
Better to use a bi-linear or cubic resize, more computing up front, but better images, this is probably the reason they do it
If you resize the image in steps, with each resize at least 50% of the previous step, you can do a pretty decent approximation of cubic resize using the canvas. Doing this for a year now, we've gotten no complaints and we have designers as clients :)
point is, their statement does not preclude them from using data for marketing purposes. some people are content with that, but others take it as a sign that they are (or will) use the data to build dossiers on users.
Our site would have been happy with full res images from the start. As it is now we are stuck with 80x80 images that needs replacing with higher res images since the originals was not kept in any sorted order.
Long story but from the start we kept originals organized. Then we restructured and the new people couldnt care less and threw away originals or left them named 1,2,3 and so on. All useless now.
1) Although the site serves up images at 1024 pixels (or whatever) today, in the future they may want larger images. When everyone is rocking 10K monitors and 6K phone displays, those small images are going to look pretty bad.
2) The original image has some metadata that they want to keep (geolocation, etc).
3) They think they can do a better and more consistent job resizing than the various browsers, which is probably true.