r/shittyaskscience • u/Elroe • 14d ago
How does a pixel know it will be deleted when shrinking a photo on my phone?
The pixels get deleted as a photo gets smaller. How do the pixels decide which ones get deleted? Does this hurt them? In turn when expanding a photo, do the pixels need to rapidly reproduce or is there some other sick trick to inflate them?
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u/lockedoutofmymainrdt 14d ago edited 14d ago
The pixels go to the pixel farm and graze the Windows XP field all day long
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u/Starsky137 14d ago
The first rule of pixel shrinking club, is you do not talk about pixel shrinking club.
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u/AztraChaitali 14d ago
As you shrink a photo, you compress the photons that make up the image. This is why most computer have a limit to how much you can shrink an image.
The energy required to shrink it further could cause city wide blackouts and overheat your computer.
Assuming that you had infinite power, and a computer with a super strong liquid cooling system, if you shrunk a sufficiently large picture past the hardcoded limit, you would create a kugelblitz. Which is a black hole made entirely of light, the literal translation is ball lightning.
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u/bondage9000 14d ago
pixels are just data so it's more like the software decides which "average" color to keep in that spot when shrinking, the "losers" never even get a chance to exist in the new version.
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u/Cute-Habit-4377 13d ago
Its similar to a game of musical chairs i have heard, it one reason why camera phones are so big, they can make the chairs small enough
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u/horridbloke 14d ago
As the picture shrinks the pictures are crowded into a smaller space and become aggressive. They fight each other and the weak perish.