Posted picture size limitiation

LordV · Post by **LordV** » Fri Oct 09, 2009 2:12 am

Just wonder if there's any thoughts on reviewing the posted picture size limitation of as I understand it, 800px max length and 200Kb size ?
Most forums now allow upto 1024px max length

Brian V.

Aynia · Post by **Aynia** » Fri Oct 09, 2009 2:15 am

I think it's to facilitate people on dial up who might want to look.

I was stuck in dial up land for 2 weeks and it drove me insane. It's really not much fun at all and I couldn't visit my normal photo forums at all.

LordV · Post by **LordV** » Fri Oct 09, 2009 3:50 am

Aynia wrote:I think it's to facilitate people on dial up who might want to look.

I was stuck in dial up land for 2 weeks and it drove me insane. It's really not much fun at all and I couldn't visit my normal photo forums at all.

Yes I can appreciate the problem for dial customers but that is getting fairly rare nowdays I think with many people on high speed cable/landline connections. Likewise with screen sizes getting bigger.

Fraid I determined quite a while ago that a pic around 1000 pixels was a good compromise between showing enough detail but not really useable for someone to pirate and print. I therefore upload at this size to my flickr gallery. Flickr does resize these but the next size down is 500 px wide which really is too small. I know you can code a clickable link to the larger size but it adds hastle.

The main point being I really do not think 800px wide pics enables people to to really judge the photos properly.

Brian v.

ChrisR · Post by **ChrisR** » Fri Oct 09, 2009 3:53 am

Last week from a hospital bed I couldn't access the site at all. I passed my pain magnified, to the customer services guy who said the site "probably had media content which could overwhelm their server". Philistines! Other sites with bigger pics weren't a problem.

One way round it - click the pic:

The 400 x 250 pic is uploaded to the forum, and the 1440x 900 is on Imageshack.

If this site's rules were changed to allow larger pics, only to be accessible through links like that, users would be able to choose what they looked at/downloaded.
Perhaps the image uploading routine could arrange the link automatically for oversized pics?

Syntax for the above is:

Code: Select all

&#91;url=http&#58;//img41.imageshack.us/img41/4330/screen1440x900.jpg&#93;
 &#91;img&#93;http&#58;//www.photomacrography.net/forum/userpix/671_screen400x250_1.jpg&#91;/img&#93;&#91;/url&#93;

Ignore the space inserted starting the second line of that, it's there just to make the text split in a more convenient place. It looks complicated but it's just cut and paste and click with an odd square bracket moved and an "=" inserted.

rjlittlefield · Post by **rjlittlefield** » Fri Oct 09, 2009 3:52 pm

Sure, we're open to reviewing the limits.

The current limit of 800 pixels was established to fit full page width on monitors that are 1024 pixels wide. Monitors that are 1280 pixels or wider will support images of 1024 pixels.

To see what happens when images are too big, try making your browser window smaller. What you'll find is that not only does the image extend off the right, but every line of text does also, throughout the whole topic. That means it's impossible to read postings without horizontal scrolling on every line. Having images that are too wide makes the forum extremely painful -- almost unusable -- for people with smaller monitors.

So we need to move very carefully at increasing the image size. See http://www.photomacrography.net/forum/v ... php?t=5902 for previous discussion on this issue. If you have a 1280 monitor, visit http://www.photomacrography.net/forum/v ... php?t=6995 and scroll down to the bottom to see what a too-wide image does to all the text in the thread.

File size in bytes is a completely independent issue, and unlike image size, it's a lot softer. The 200 KB limit was established partly for dialup and partly to help stay under storage limits of our old hosting service. Storage limits are a lot bigger now, and in my opinion 200 KB is already too big for comfortable dialup, so I'd be easy to convince on that one.

It would be great if the forum software "played nicely" with larger images, for example automatically downsizing them for routine display while also keeping a larger version for on-demand display. But the stuff we're using doesn't do that. There may be some facility like that in the newer phpBB3; I haven't investigated enough to know.

--Rik

LordV · Post by **LordV** » Sat Oct 10, 2009 1:11 am

Hi Rik ,
It was my assumption (maybe wrong) that most photographers would be using monitors with higher resolution than 1024 px width nowdays.
As I commented earlier, all the other photography forums I use allow 1024 pixel width without anybody complaining about it.

Brian v.

elf · Post by **elf** » Sat Oct 10, 2009 9:31 am

How about adding another forum which will allow larger images? This could be used to test how large an image is practical or use to link back to a thread in another forum.

rjlittlefield · Post by **rjlittlefield** » Sat Oct 10, 2009 1:03 pm

LordV wrote:It was my assumption (maybe wrong) that most photographers would be using monitors with higher resolution than 1024 px width nowdays.

Me too. But the last time we discussed this (Sept 2008), it turned out that photomacrography.net's most prolific poster had opted for 1024 X 768.

I've posted a poll to find out.

--Rik

LordV · Post by **LordV** » Mon Oct 12, 2009 12:44 am

rjlittlefield wrote:
LordV wrote:It was my assumption (maybe wrong) that most photographers would be using monitors with higher resolution than 1024 px width nowdays.
Me too. But the last time we discussed this (Sept 2008), it turned out that photomacrography.net's most prolific poster had opted for 1024 X 768.

I've posted a poll to find out.

--Rik

Thanks Rik

Brian v.