John N - Why not reduce file size before posting

Hi,

I'm not sure if it's just me, but these huge pictures make your threads painfully slow to load. As an experiment, I downloaded your picture newbeam01.jpg and used PaintShopPro to reduce the size.

The result? A picture 64 rather than 530KB in size and very little reduction in picture quality:

"My" Picture (64KB):
Your Picture (530KB):



Depending on how you pay for your web site, this could also be costing you big money!

Damn. The compressed one looks BETTER.

Yes, reduction in filesize (and dimension) is considered good etiquete as well.

Hi. Devils Advocate here. Yes it is good to reduce file size but sometime I like looking at ultra super-size pictures, and he did warn you of the file size in the subject header. On the other hand I suppose that you could post a lower res picture and leave the high res one on the server with a link.

Whatever...

Hi. Dial-up user here. I'd much rather see a smaller sized pic embedded in the message with a link to the full-sized version so I can decide whether or not to click on it. There are several huge pics in other threads which I won't even bother to view because they'll take 10 minutes to download at dial-up speeds (28.8, 33.6, and 56Kbps). My connection this morning is 50.6Kbps, which is actually a bit faster than it usually is. But even at that speed, I won't view a 2.7 megabyte pic because it simply takes too long to download.

I try to keep posted pics at 640x480 and if a larger pic is needed, a link to it is provided underneath.

The other benefit of posting pics with a horizontal size of 640 pixels or less is that the formatting of UBB is preserved for the vast majority of users, and any follow-up messages posted in the threads aren't lost to the right margin, forcing you to scroll back and forth to read them.

My 2¢

YAH YAH, I KNOW!

I was just being lazy.

It's kind of a pain to resize images to whatever people might want (and it impacts my generious host's finite disk storage space -- bandwidth is much less of an issue). I don't have the ability to do a server side resize and it would probably cost too much CPU anyway.

I have actually done this in the past. For example a recent Surefire post:
http://186thousand.com/cgi-bin/ultimatebb.cgi?ubb=get_topic;f=25;t=000002

The point of these (from my perspective anyway) are to be big, bold and fun. In some cases you might want them to be the size of your screen (which varies) or you might want to see some specific detail. In any case, having large source material is key.

You are right I should lower the quality of the image but again, it takes some work and you need to check each one to fine the sweet spot. My utility that does this requires I do a "save as" then I have to go find the file and load it. Ick. I also have to now manage the extra copies of files as I'm not interested in losing the originals. In addition, if I offer various sizes I have to go through it many times per picture.

I actually posted all of these from my 56K dialup (typically get 40Kb), so I feel your pain.

I tried to be very specific that the content was a picture and warn how big they are. I'll try to come up with something better as time allows.

-john