Joe Fugate mentioned this in a thread on internet connections, but a lot of people seem to have skipped it.
If you have a picture in your signature, and it is over 100k, PLEASE reduce it. It’s extremely annoying to those of us with low bandwidth or dialup connections. Not everyone can get super-duper multi-megabit cable modems.
Even 100k is pushing it, you should be able to get a decent picture in 50k or less. The full of picture threads I usually avoid, it takes too long for me to display. But I can choose to view or not view those. The sudden appearance of a large photo in the signature of someone who replied to an otherwise all-text thread though, is not so controllable.
I think the pic I had of the Zephyr was about 70K, I took it off a few days ago.
I have seen an animation of the Bachmann Acela (I have a set on the way) I wanted to use it as a signiture, anybody seen it on a web site somewhere (I lost it)
and of course, those of us on low-speed connections can take care of this problem ourselves by going to our own profiles and secting “no” or “text only” for the entry on viewing poster’s signatures
This has made the forum hugely more readable for me.
I have never seen a single graphic in a signature. I must have clicked that when I signed up on no graphics. Wondered why I wasn’t seeing anything but train posts [:)]
My signature pic is all of 28k. I have a cable modem and a monster computer and I still try to play fair. In some threads, it still takes a bit of time load all the photos. I try to keep even the photos for the “Show your work” threads down to 100k if possible. That is about 800 x 600 pixels.
WOW! thanks for the info. my sig. was an 118k.bmp, so i converted it to a .jpg, now its only 20.6k. BIG diferance! i didnt realize how much more space a .bmp took as opposed to a .jpg. good to go now, THANKS!
another WOW! on my sig,i converted it from a bmp to a jpg and clicked on properties, it said my new jpg was 20.6k. i uploaded it to photobucket and changed the bmp in my sig to my new reduced jpg. i just went back to this thread and clicked on my sig, saved it to desktop and checked the properties, now it says its 40.1k. hmm, strange, i dont understand this, but at anyrate its under 50k so i"m still good to go[:D]
Finally… I have tried to make this point several times myself. There is no need for big signatures or 1 meg (or larger) photos in the forum. They don’t even fit on a standard monitor. The problem is that those on DSL (or faster) hook ups with newer computers don’t even realize how big the photos are because their gear can handle the big sized images without a problem and newer browsers instantly reduce them to fit on the screen… My browser jumps all over when it scrolls an image that is big. I am getting a new computer soon, but I think some attention paid to total file size would make the forum easier to navigate.
You can right click on any image and look under properties to determine size…
I went ahead and took mine out for now, until I can make it smaller.
It was about 108kb, I had never checked it. My apologies to the slow people.[:-^][:D] Dave
The problem with the big photos can only be solved by manualy editing them as bukwrm said. Even though the forum scales the photo down if it has too many pixels it still takes the same amount of time as loading a large 100+ kb photo
another free program you can get on the web to reduce our photos is ifranview. it is free to download and a great program. it’s the one I use to view photos. It also lets you open a pic as say bmp and save it to another format like jpg. its a small download, and well worth it in my opinion. just do a google search for it.