Since the iOS 5.1.1 jailbreak is released today, I was going to quickly dump some things off my phone, to be organized later, so I could hurry-up and do a clean DFU-mode firmware restore and start clean/fresh on my iPhone 4. My DropBox account was full, so I decided to use my 25GB SkyDrive account. I had only used SkyDrive once, long before I activated the free 25GB. I'm stuck with Windows XP at work, but SkyDrive doesn't have a software client for XP. I didn't want to copy these files to my work computer if I didn't need to, so I tested to see if I could connect my phone to the computer and upload files to SkyDrive through the web site. The file-open dialog does allow multi-select, but it gives some kind of path error whenever I select more than one file on my phone (that's probably Windows' fault).
I uploaded a picture to test and briefly saw an upload progress indicator with a checked option to "resize images to ____ x ____".
I do not want any modifications to the files on my SkyDrive.
I do not want pictures to be re-compressed.
I do not want to lose any possible amount of detail or metadata, even if it might be imperceptible.
I want this to behave like a STORAGE DRIVE...not anything else! So, of course, I un-checked the option to resize images, then deleted the #$%^ed file, then re-uploaded it with the resize option not checked. I had a suspicion that it was still going through a re-compression algorithm, even if it's not resizing the image; So I re-downloaded the file and ran a binary file comparison (fc /b) to the original file. The contents were completely different. The one that passed through the SkyDrive actually had a larger file size than the original.
JPEG is lossy compression. Regardless of file size and image dimensions, a re-encoded file always loses some amount of image quality / detail. Modifying my files is not acceptable.
Moral of the story: DropBox > SkyDrive
Redacted. Did it again on my home computer and the file checks out. I'll have to try again from work sometime.
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