For all of us modemers - there's not many of us, I know, but we DO exist - it's really sad that some threads contain so many big images that the thread essentially becomes unviewable :(

For example, this thread contains almost 1 MB of big images! I waited and waited but it's simply too many KB for me to download. If I want to view such a thread I have to go do something else for 5 minutes then come back. Hardly not an option.. simply too much waiting.

Image size:
There's absolutely no reason for an attached image to be bigger than 640x480. In most cases, 320x240 will do just fine. Should there be a reason to attach a bigger image, please link to it from a smaller image!

File size:
This is what bothers me the most. There's absolutely no reason for a 640x480 image to be bigger than ~70 KB. Most 640x480 images, if compressed to a reasonable level where image quality is still good, will be around 50 KB. As for 320x240 images, there's no reason for them to be bigger than 20 KB.

I realize not all people have image handling programs, and not all people who do have them know how to use them. But most people do, and it's not that hard to take a minute to resize and compress an image before posting it. And if you don't have any image handling program, you can easily adjust the image size setting and quality setting on your digital camera. Most photos of computers, fans, or whatever it could be does not have to be 1024x768 pics in super-fine quality - most often a 320x240 pic in low/medium quality will do just fine.

Sorry if I sound angry, I'm just tired of not being able to view all threads I want to view because of unnecessary large images.

Aside from the reasons ecto mentions. It is in the forum guidelines that pictures should not exceed a width of 500px. The mods on these forums don't act like a police force, like mods on other forums do. That still does not mean you should ignore the rules.

Tibors is right. We jump on the ones we notice, but since I think all of us "insiders" run broadband, and with screen resolutions beyond 800x600 (I run at 1600x1024), we sometimes miss offenders.

There's also another good option: Post links instead of images. That lets the reader decide if they want to download them or not.

I've sent a message about this to jamesavery22 regarding those huge files. I had not noticed them before.

Perhaps it is time for SPCR mods to be more proactive about this issue. It is very hard to stop people from doing such things... but in future, after a quick warning, overly big pics will simply be changed to links.

Just post here any other threads that exceed our photo guidelines. Thanks.

Will do.

The BBCode to link from a thumbnail is [url=http://image_url][img]http://thumbnail_url[/img][/url]
I tried it in the test forum, and it works!

I think the gallery should take exception to this - I like seeing huge pictures and intimate details of some of these systems.

Depends on the picture, really, but I do agree that anything over 100k in size is probably excessive unless multiple components are featured (e.g. a motherboard shot)

Generally I find the size of pics in SPCR articles to be excellent, so we should use those as a guide.

For quick & dirty photo handling, use Irfanview

The most important dimension is the horizontal one. Most people expect to scroll vertically but don't like having to scroll horizontally. The pics in the SPCR articles are typically no wider than 600 pixels. Once in a while, there'll be an exception to maybe 650 or 700. But any larger than that, and we move to a new browser window.

The other key is to crop effectively. If you only want to focus in on a part of the pic, just crop out the rest and resize if necessary.

You can always link to a larger version.

Another thing that may not be obvious is compression. I was shocked to discover how much that helped in my gallery thread. The pictures that come out of cameras are raw pixels, uncompressed. Threefold drop in file size with no noticeable quality decrease? Yes please.

Weird resolution.


Oh, and I am all for thumbnails, but I do want high-detail pics in 1600x1200+ of the inside of a case.

640x480 for the inside of a case is useless, as is 56k.

All it takes is the poster to use ImageShack or similar, host their pic at max res (a 1.5Mb jpeg is big enough isn't it?)and drop the provided 'forum thumbnail link' in their post (with a filesize warning) and then surely everyone is happy?

Probably worth mentioning for Windows users that Paint.net is free and quite capable for image editing. You can find it at http://www.getpaint.net/

I'm not a big fan of having to install .NET on my windows PCs but this is the first program that made it seem worth doing for me.

Picture Resizer 2.0 is a very easy-to-use (free) photoresizer.

Another good, free image editor is IrfanView. It is quite good for all basic cropping and resizing and saving is virtually all image file formats. It also can "stitch" together images, though they have to have the same vertical size.

I just used the thunmbnail code in this thread and it did take a 900x1340 pic down to 100x100.

Note most of the times I post a pic in a thread I'm linking to another sites content so I have no control over the size of the pic. I have no hosting accounts to put my own thumbnails or resized pic on if they don't provide one.

Is there a BBcode way to resize the image in place if the file size isn't an issue but the image is too wide? Can I just use HTML syntax <img src="image.jpg" width="200" height="150"> or is there a BBcode equivalent?

I saw on another site that uses bb that you could do [img=500x300] but that doesn't seem to work here.

Any chance you could enable that Mike?