I should start this off with saying that I had been under the impression that a superior image was the one with the most pixels. I now understand it is the image with the largest file size.

On with my tale of woe.

So someone commented they found a larger version of this post which I thought was just a person enlarging the image so I looked to find if there were other versions by the artist and found a larger one on the artist's tumbler and uploaded it here then found that the one I had been linked to was from the artist's twitter which made it legitimate so I flagged the one I had just uploaded from Tumblr and put on the new one here to then find that the displayed image was only a smaller version of the origin file which I then posted here and flagged the smaller version for deletion.

Shortly after I uploaded a larger area image and it was taken down which then confused me on what a superior image was so I contacted an admin on it and now I now it's file size not image size which leaves this fantastic mess I've made for myself. The one from Tumblr is the largest file size which makes it the one that should stay but I had flagged it for deletion... so there's my mess, how do I fix it?

Just keep your eyes on it and if it does get taken down, contact the admin who did so.

I don't know how the optimal version works, but "Larger file size" doesn't sound like it. Bloated file size without any difference in image quality or size sounds like a bad thing to me, since it'd take up more harddrive space for no good reason?

^ AFAIK it's 'highest level of real detail'.

I proposed and tested a metric for estimating actual level of detail previously. It turns out that e621 maybe can't use it to help with quality checks (because they don't have ImageMagick available to them), but anyone with Imagemagick installed can run:

And the file with the lowest listed entropy value will generally be the original. Most common kinds of mangling (upscale, downscale, encode to low quality JPG) raise the entropy.

Millcore said:
I should start this off with saying that I had been under the impression that a superior image was the one with the most pixels. I now understand it is the image with the largest file size.

Not true. It's the image with the "most quality" like savageorange said.

This could mean highest resolution, or not if it is upscaled or has more artifacts.

The oldest image is usually approved if both images are identical pixel by pixel. A JPG unnecessarily turned into a larger file size PNG will result in the PNG being deleted if spotted.

Millcore said:
Shortly after I uploaded a larger area image and it was taken down which then confused me on what a superior image was so I contacted an admin on it and now I now it's file size not image size which leaves this fantastic mess I've made for myself. The one from Tumblr is the largest file size which makes it the one that should stay but I had flagged it for deletion... so there's my mess, how do I fix it?

No way did that happen the way you said it did. Something was lost in translation.

This is hardly a "fantastic mess" as you have 796 approved images and 14 deleted images.

Thank you everyone for the further insight, largest to savageorange for the software suggestion.

Lance_Armstrong said:
Not true. It's the image with the "most quality" like savageorange said.

This could mean highest resolution, or not if it is upscaled or has more artifacts.

The oldest image is usually approved if both images are identical pixel by pixel. A JPG unnecessarily turned into a larger file size PNG will result in the PNG being deleted if spotted.

No way did that happen the way you said it did. Something was lost in translation.

This is hardly a "fantastic mess" as you have 796 approved images and 14 deleted images.

Yes, I've only been going with what the artists post since I've seen people and sites take images and upscale them massively so they can be used as wallpapers and such. So I only go with what comes directly from the artists.

To fully quote the response I got:

We accept the post with the larger file size. The deleted version was 508.9KB whilst the parent post is 1.6MB.

Sorry I'm not giving a name, I feel it would be against their privacy to put that here. I'll PM you the name if you must know.
The response was from me asking about the removal of post# 947678 from the source [LINK] which was 1900x3000, larger than the parent. (1216x1920) which is what caused my initial confusion.

Alternately I'd suppose that the short response with small detail was due to the admin just being busy as I cant imagine its easy keeping this site going with nearing a million posts being hosted. I actually hadn't considered that there would be people around here that don't speak fluent English, I suppose I need to lurk more and perhaps learn a new language.

Oh, and while I guess it's wouldn't seem like any large ordeal to someone else this have been quite troubling for me as in the past 2-3 days the number of deleted posts I have doubled from 7. (I was so happy of my 99% successful posting rate; however, I guess 98% isn't so bad)

Once again, thank you to everyone who responded.

Millcore said:
The response was from me asking about the removal of post# 947678 from the source [LINK] which was 1900x3000, larger than the parent. (1216x1920) which is what caused my initial confusion.

I'm not sure exactly what official policy janitor/mods/admins got when comparing versions, but in this case I can see the problem, the smaller dimension PNG is of higher quality, but the larger dimension JPG has greater resolution but lower quality. Both are potentially good, e.g. the larger dimension JPG could fairly easily be cleaned up and resampled as PNG. What you'd really want is the PNG with dimensions and resolution of the JPG.

Millcore said:
Oh, and while I guess it's wouldn't seem like any large ordeal to someone else this have been quite troubling for me as in the past 2-3 days the number of deleted posts I have doubled from 7. (I was so happy of my 99% successful posting rate; however, I guess 98% isn't so bad)

I don't know what you upload, but if you're someone who uploads a lot from few artists, a takedown can set you back hundreds of posts. I'd say start worrying when that happens, and even then take it easy.