I just got an idea of something, and I'm not sure if it's possible or not.
I assume you know how you can change the layout in your profile to see like the older blue simviation or the more modern gray one.  But why not make one where you can upload images with no limit to image size, and another that will automatically decrease the images so they meet the 155Kb limit for the users with older and/or older computers?  That way some of the people can see the much higher quality images without slowing down users on older/slower computers.

Like I said, I don't know if it's possible.

I have another idea. You could put the 155 kb limit away but keep the 650kb max limit. So the more shots, the less size. It would help in retaining quality allot

hyperpep111 wrote on Oct 14^th, 2011 at 12:54pm:

This has come up a few times, and I think it would be a good idea. I'm not entirely sure why it wasn't taken up though. Although, in such events as the screenshot contests, it means that when the finalists are posted, there will be a large page to load. This doesn't concern most users, who are using super fast broadband, but there are some members who are probably using dial-up or pay-per-MB connections. An alternative would be to have a small and large entry (one suitable for the finalists), but then you might as well just post the small version and have a link to the larger file... Which is something that people do anyway!


An automated upload scaler isn't a new invention, but it is a bit tricky. There are plenty of websites that will automatically compress images, or produces images of varying size; Flickr does this, and produces something like 5 photo sizes, plus the original. I would imagine that there is some free forum plugin for this sort of thing, but it also means that the server memory usage will shoot up, and the memory per image (as you'd have copies) would also go up.


I guess the best thing to do would be to survey the members to see what connection is being used (this was done a while back, but a review might be in order). The automatic scaling will be largely down to finding the right software plugin, and ensuring there is enough space. But some sort of script that loads small images for members who choose it, and large images for those who want the full fat version, would be possible. It could be one of the profile options for each member. But yeah, not a simple procedure.

Sharing from my various experiences...

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From what I've seen on dealing with images, rule number 1 is "don't let HTML/CSS resize images." It's very inefficient, requiring the full size image to be downloaded whether it's 200KiB or 20MiB. Plus it doesn't deal well with things like text and certain angled lines in the image; causing them to be blurry or just look off. 

Also, I think zooming out could only really work if browser had the option to zoom out in images only. Even then the issue with blurring would still be an issue. Although I do wonder if any browsers offer image only zoom... Now I'll have to go and look.

Oh, and laptops create a problem with their small screens and all.

There's always options such as resizing an image after uploading using something such as PHP's imagick extension. But that means more disk space, CPU time and RAM being spent on each image. Options like that would have to be carefully considered.

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I do in fact know some people whose only options are 1Mbps DSL or even satellite with very low speeds and high caps. Heck, my family has a cabin up in northern WI where the only option for internet access is 768Kbps, and that stops a few lots short of actually reaching the cabin. Although, like you said, people have the option of using services such as Opera Turbo to try and speed things up.

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I could get behind opening up the forums to third-party image hosts and keeping only the 650KiB per thread limit.