EDIT: This info below is now out of date. You can upload more or less anything you want in terms of images and sizes. We convert the original image to a lighter format if we need to. Don’t worry, be happy.
The current default for a maximum individual image size on posts is 3 MB. If they are larger than that then it should give back a nice upload error, or alternatively it will just look at you confused and you’ll think it has hung. When an image is uploaded smaller thumbnails are shown in the posts, so for mobile users the topics load faster. The original can always be accessed by clicking into the image. You can have as many 3 MB images in a post as you like (well, 65,536 but basically a lot).
If you have the odd image to upload that is larger than 3 MB then an easy way to upload is just to load it up in your default Windows/Mac viewer and then CTRL+C copy - you can then paste it into a post editor box and it’ll make a JPG for you automatically.
If you have lots of large images then it might be worth either saving them originally smaller before uploading or batch converting them with an OS tool first. @EinsteinEP likes xnconvert, or old stuff like Ifranview or ImageMagik for command line stuff works as well. If you have a nice Windows or Mac free image batch converter tool that you like then let us know.
The 3MB limit was picked to allow @BeachAV8R to keep some money to send Kai to college rather than spend it on storage, but it’s easily tweakable if people feel they want it larger and that limit is too low. Or, I guess, we just want less people at college. Happy either way.
The issue for me is the .png files that ShadowplayGEForce Experience Share creates are very large, by default - often greater than 3MB. I try to use Fraps as well, but then the frame counter gets caught in my ShadowplayGEForce Experience Share videos.
With a really larger copy/paste or huge image the forum software basically tries a BANZAI!! move and tries to downscale the image using javascript browser-side as a final futile attempt to work. As with anything large, binary’ish and javascript in the browser, it ends badly.
We were forced to code in Flash as part of animation school. I hated it! I made a crappy flash game and didn’t even bother to finish it! Flash is horrendous!
I use the Snipping Tool built into windows to “grab” my large photo into one that is smaller storage-wise. That way I have the option to rename it to something that is relevant when I am uploading, and save it to a separate folder for easy cleanup later.
It’s also great for grabbing screenshots of Windowed games.
It is tedious for a large batch as mentioned already.
Great idea… I’m sure my Amazon AWS bill would love smaller uploads. Similarly, I run most of the photos I take with my phone though a easy to use image resize program which takes the file size from 5 or 6MB to 1MB. For trip reports and stuff, I generally resize them down to 500KB-ish. And then I post a 20MB GIF and blow the whole budget.
Beach, should we consider implementing some image size limit and have the forum resize it automatically if it can or at least enforce it? Seems only fair!
It does that already, but I just never communicated it very clearly, plus it’s changed over time (from what I wrote in the first post) and I never said anything either.
We allow a maximum of about 10 MB to be uploaded. We then automatically scale down the original image if it’s bigger than 6 MB. We could probably make that a bit smaller. The 6 MB used to be the max upload size, but now it’s actually the target for the resizing of the original image.
Note: this applies to the ‘original’ image what you see when you click through - the thumbnails you see in the threads are much smaller and already converted to lightweight sizes.
The other setting we have is a limit based on megapixels, where if an image is bigger than the setting (currently 40 mp, so I’ll try that smaller) then it converts the image to a lighter jpg, i.e. you upload a very large PNG so we automatically convert the original to a lighter JPG.
I’ll try out putting a max megapixels to something like 8.3MP (that’s a max of a 4k image screenshot) plus see if lower the 6 MB does much harm.
A lot of the Amazon bill is caching stuff to make the puny server seem better, while the cost of storage is around 2.3 cents USD per GB per month, and we currently have about 19 GB stored.
