Ok, that seems to be working.
If we see any tragic loss in functionality or fidelity then I can fiddle some more.
@Navynuke99 - happy news, I’ve enabled more converters so that our upload can now handle .bmp files direct.
@BeachAV8R the files being stored should be actively converted to JPG more aggressively now meaning smaller storage space being used. If you upload big files then it won’t store them as big files, so no need to convert first - it’ll be automagic.
Love that technology!
@fearlessfrog has us running lean and mean and I’m forever grateful for that. I like that we can have fairly big images (6MB is pretty big) since a lot of our posts (screens from games and pictures from “life”) are pretty cool in higher detail.
So to recap, our current image settings are 3 MB maximum (you can upload much bigger than that, don’t worry), and it will then resize down on the forum server based on the max target size and the megapixels as well, as in, it will reduce the maximum image size to be no bigger than a 4K desktop size if it’s bigger than that (while keeping ratio).
When it gets a .bmp or a PNG then it will convert the original (and the thumbnails in the threads we see that are smaller) to a JPG at a quality rate of 95% (pretty hard to tell reduction in quality), meaning that a typical desktop screenshot should be less than 500 KB for the full original we store.
It’s really a compromise between storage costs, the power needed by the gerbils on the server to do the on-the-fly conversion at upload time and the bandwidth/caching ratio of people viewing on less than ideal connections. I could go back an ‘rebake’ all existing images, but the server would faint. The trouble is people live on all sides of the infernal globe, so it’s rare to get a quiet period to make the server all sweaty for hard batch image work.
Anyway, from now on it will be better. 
That’s awesome. And I appreciate the explanation of the hows and whys.
One more stupid question - when we upload GIFs, does the forum do any file size reduction on that or is it just what it is (limited to a max file size)…?
I just uploaded a gif and noticed the size restriction has gone from the previous 5 MB to the new 3 MB, which is ok with me I guess. Just have to do more optimizations.
My vault of Dumb and Dumber gifs is enormous.
That feature is called ‘remote images’ and it’s intended to help in the situation that someone links inline an image or gif and then the original site wipes it later on. It’s to stop ‘image rot’, with image hosting sites that don’t have a business model going broke (um, mudspike excluded of course (nervous laugh)) means that our old topics don’t look like a bunch of broken links - we grab a copy, and yes it is limited by the overall file size limit. We don’t convert it if it’s a gif.
A lot of plain gif pastes will actually convert to a much smaller .gifv format, while is essentially a video file. imgur.com is good for this, but sites like giphy.com still serve up enormous gifs that we probably won’t ‘remote image’ copy.
Some tests:
https://media2.giphy.com/media/dmZFyFOHNecCxlqxnH/giphy.gif is actually a 1.3 MB .webp format file. It only pretends to look like a GIF.
In about 10 minutes (the grace period of post edits) we’ll see if the ‘remove images’ feature kicks in and grabs a local copy or not. As it’s an ‘optimization’ (getting a local copy) then for gifs/animations it’s not super important if it does or not I guess.
EDIT: Yep, looks like it tried for the original big GIF rather than the .webp and choked. I’ll see if that can be made better.
It’s interesting to see how “bandwidth wars” have played out as the internet has evolved. I remember the very first days of when linking to other content providers started to give you “hot linking not authorized” type of results. I still don’t know how Giphy and Tumblr and stuff make enough on ad revenue to exist…but then again, I don’t understand how You Tubers that get paid to do things make enough of an impact to make that profitable. I guess much of the new generation ONLY watch You Tube and Netflix. With that said though, I tried to listen to regular FM radio the other day and couldn’t believe that business model can still survive. I quickly switched back to Pandora…which has started to get a bit more intrusive with ads for their free service, but hey…the bills gotta get paid. It’s still better than FM radio (except for NPR).
Updated some things forum software side to improve support of animated gifs, because who doesn’t just love those?
Gifs sourced from giphy.com, reactiongifs.com, tenor.com or gfycat.com should now work better. If you use a source other than those then let me know via PM and we could add it to the ‘fun list’.
Note: they aren’t really gifs, they are HTML5 web videos in a format called .webp. GIF is sort of an historical term for a silent video now, like ‘Charlie Chaplin made GIFs?’ that causes me to weep for our future generation. Luckily the future generation will get a trashed planet, so all seems fair.
I did not know these sites existed and I’ve been making my own gifs with EZGIF thus far … just testing now …
Ahhh, excellent.
