User blog:Ankoopa/The Need for Higher Quality Images

Introduction
According to this page, this Wiki has actual guidelines on uploading good quality images. These are the following guidelines: Most of the screen captures in episode galleries do not follow the guidelines, and therefore need to be replaced. Another problem that episode galleries have is that it has unnecessary screen captures that are too similar to other captures that it bloats the gallery. About 150 captures are enough for a single 10-minute episode, twice that amount (300) for a 20-minute episode.

The Reupload Process
Currently, it is tedious to upload a large amount of images to the Wiki and putting it all in a gallery. I'm going to share my process of reuploading images in bulk and putting all of it in a gallery. Here are the software and programs I use:
 * SMPlayer (for precise capturing of frames due to its ability to jump back to previous frames, unlike VLC)
 * Wiki-Up (for bulk image uploading)
 * Waifu2x-Caffe (for cleaning up video compression artifacts)
 * Microsoft Excel (for listing down the file names of cleaned-up images)

Steps in the process:
1. Frame Captures

2. Cleaning Up
 * 1) Load an episode in SMPlayer. It should play at it's normal aspect ratio (4:3)
 * 2) This is the hardest part: manually capture all the needed frames from the episode. I make sure that the frame looks important in telling the episode's plot and it shouldn't look silly. Also no capturing of similar frames.
 * 3) After capturing all frames, find the directory where SMPlayer stores all the screen captures. (In my computer, it's in C:\Users\Kerman\Pictures'\smplayer_screenshots).
 * 4) Browse through the captures in order, deleting any unnecessary captures.

3. File Listing
 * 1) Using Waifu2x-Caffe, load all screen captures from the screen capture directory.
 * 2) Set the output path to another folder. Make sure that it looks something like this: C:\Users\Kerman\Pictures\clean_screencaps
 * 3) Set the output extension to ".jpg", and the quality to "100". (Don't worry, the images usually won't go past 200 kilobytes)
 * 4) Set the conversion mode to 'Denoise Only".
 * 5) Set the denoise level to "Level 3".
 * 6) Select "2-D illust (CUnet Model)" as the model.
 * 7) Press "Start". Surprisingly, the process usually takes no more than 3 minutes.

4. File Uploading and Adding to Gallery
 * 1) In the output folder, create an Excel file.
 * 2) In Excel, select the "Data" tab, then "Get Data", and "Get File -> Get Folder".
 * 3) Click "Browse", and select the folder where all the cleaned up captures are stored.
 * 4) Click "Transform Data", and delete all columns except "Name". Then click "Close & Load".
 * 5) It will list down the file names of every screen capture in the folder. It will be handy later.
 * 1) Using Wiki-Up, login using your Wiki credentials (don't worry, it's safe), and direct the program to the Rugrats Wiki url.
 * 2) Click "Add Files", then select all the images in the cleaned up screencaps folder.
 * 3) Click "Upload", then wait until all images have been uploaded.
 * 4) On the episode's gallery page, edit it in Source Mode
 * 5) Back in Excel, copy all the filenames by selecting the cells that contain it (exclude the filename for the Excel file).
 * 6) Paste it in the edit page (make sure it's still in Source Mode, and it should be inside the gallery tag).
 * 7) Switch to Visual Mode, and check if there are any missing files.
 * 8) Click "Publish" when done.

Since I have documented my process, I hope this will be of any help to anyone else willing to replace all images in this wiki to a higher quality. At this rate, I'm only doing 1 episode per day. I can only provide higher quality screen captures of up to Season 4, because that's all I legally own.

Thanks for reading, and that's all, folks!

Ankoopa (talk) 15:39, May 13, 2020 (UTC)