This is just a reminder to all the folks who like to post photos here on the forum:
Whether you have dial-up or high-speed internet, it’s always a good idea to keep your photo file sizes 100K or less when posting them so that they load faster.
As a good example to emulate, Mister Beasley just put together and posted a wonderful photo essay called Making an Atlas Deck into a True Pit turntable, which contains a fair number photos to show his progress and work. Even with dial-up, each picture loads reasonably quick. And each of the pictures can be clicked on and enlarged for better detail viewing. The reason why his sizable essay loads quickly is because his photos average about 50-60K each. His largest is only 98K.
I see some photos posted here on the forum that are 200K, 400K - even, 1Mg+ in size. That’s just way TOO big and unnecessary for posting. It’s not so bad when it’s just one post in a thread. However, when you have a thread like Weekend or Mid-week Photo Fun, it really snow balls. If you don’t know how large your photos are, right click on the them with your mouse then scroll down to and click “Properties”. Like I said, 100K are smaller is preferable and more than adequate.
To reduce the size of my pictures, I use Microsoft Picture it! As well as a good program for viewing my photos, MS Picture it! gives my several options to save them in a variety of sizes for e-mailing and posting them on my web site. I’m sure there are some freeware programs that you can download that will do the same thing.
How about not quoting pictures over and over 10 times too! This gets really annoying on WPF. I feel sorry for the dial up folks. All you have to do is take the ] off of the last [/img ] when posting a quote with a picture. This disables the picture but leaves the words. (have a heart people)
I mostly agree (especially about reposting pic’s)… but there are times when larger shots are required and file size will be bigger. As technology (e.g. 10-20 megapixel cameras) advances, this limit becomes cumbersome. Two options come to mind:
Post the smaller pic and then a link for a larger version of the pic.
Most of us keep images in folders under “My Documents”, “My pictures”. When you open a photo there, on the left is a task bar, with one of the offerings “e-mail this picture”. If you indicate a photo, then click on this link, you will automatically be suggested to resize, which the program does for you when you agree to it. The resulting image can be saved to a new file folder for all resized photos…which is where I keep mine. When I go to upload to railimages, I go to that one folder that has no photo file larger than about 80k.
So, virtually everyone has such a capability in their software right now…or should.
I would agree that if the details are THAT important to the picture, a link to another site (like folks do for their YouTube videos) would be the most appropriate. Cropping the non-essentials from a photo would also be another way to display details without having a large file.
I keep my digitial camera set at 1 megapixels. I upload the pictures to my computer, and then host them on Railimages. That site, free but donation supported (hint hint) automatically compresses the pictures (or whatever) to the size I post with. It’s basically no work at all for me. The auto-expand characteristic comes for free from Railimages, too.
When I posted on WPF last weekend I remembered that you had mentioned this issue somewhere, but my photos were about 130K, which I thought wasn’t too far over the 100K limit. However, I just went back to check them, and a number of them were around 250K and I didn’t even realize it!
Sorry. [:I] I tend to think of everyone as having high speed these days.
Thanks Loathar, you took the words right out of my mouth. Having the same big pictures downloading more than once is a major waste! I pass up on WFP most of the time because of this.
Peter
LOL another die hard anti PC person. I am assuming a mac perefence? I use a Dual Xeon machine, a quad Mac Pro and a Quad Athlon RHEL4 machine at work… I prefer the Linux machine first, PC second and mac dead last. Sure the Mac OS is pretty and easy to use, but the software makes the bulk of the productivity of the machine! Try as they might, Apple still just doesn’t have the software availability they should have at this point in their company life. I could launch into a deep this vs that debate, but its rather pointless as I imagine what I use my computers for is not the same as anyone else, so we would be debating about apples and oranges… and a banana or two
As for photo editing software, I know its an expenditure, but look into Photoshop Elements. Its a watered down version of the whole Photoshop suite for like 60-80 bucks. I have tried all the freeware Photoshop replacements and have only been annoyed by them. Having a tech supported, registered peice of software is worth it in this arena… in my opinion of course. I designed my website graphics 100% in Photoshop elements (Link is in signature) in about 15 minutes. Great software!
One last thing. PSE has a batch processing feature. If you have a ton of huge pictures, it can copy them, resize them, and rename them, all automaticly
I use a Dual Xeon machine, a quad Mac Pro and a Quad Athlon RHEL4 machine at work… I prefer the Linux machine first, PC second and mac dead last. Sure the Mac OS is pretty and easy to use, but the software makes the bulk of the productivity of the machine! Try as they might, Apple still just doesn’t have the software availability they should have at this point in their company life. I could launch into a deep this vs that debate, but its rather pointless as I imagine what I use my computers for is not the same as anyone else, so we would be debating about apples and oranges… and a banana or two 