Images over 500kb

[Tech]

Folks...

Image uploads are literally getting out of hand. Some of you are uploading images of 10mb! The most common seems to be in the 3mb to 8mb mark.

This is just insane and unsustainable. Any image over 500kb will be removed... Gradually.

[at9]

I have a fast connection so large images don't worry me but they cost you money to store and those with poor connectivity will suffer long response times. I too get irritated when people email huge attached images without good reason. If you're sending email attachments from a phone then both Android and Iphone have an option to send smaller image files. I've not uploaded an image to here from my phone but I would expect the same facility to be available.

On my desktop I use Image Resizer for Windows, a free download, that allows you to resize images from the right click menu. or I use Irfanview. Similar tools must surely be available for Linux and Mac.

Tech, some forum software has an option to automatically resize images when they are uploaded. Is that possible here?

[Tech]

On 3/8/2019 at 7:47 AM, at9 said:

Is that possible here?

Annoyingly, not quiet., hence my asking... I can specify gallery image sizes, but images attached to posts, I can only specify total size of the post itelf, not a "per picture" size.

Have now just changed it so that it wont accept anything over 100kb or 800 x 600.

[at9]

I fully understand why you're doing this but 100K is pretty tight. When posting to other forums that don't impose a size limit I keep my images below 500K as a matter of courtesy. It would take rather more effort to keep them below 100K, especially when posting from a phone.. The size in pixels is much less important. It doesn't directly relate to file size. The main reason for keeping it down is to stop pictures appearing too large on the screen. Since pictures can be portrait or landscape format I suggest that 1024x1024 would be reasonable.

One thing the forum software does seem to do correctly is automatically orientate images based on the EXIF information. In many places you see sideways or upside down images. I usually try to get the orientation correct (using Irfanview) but those posting from a phone usually won't even know that their image isn't the right way up.

[jeremy1986]

I agree - the 100k or 800/600px  limit is like living in the 90's.  

I also don't see huge amounts of attachments of gallery images being uploaded regularly, but I guess it can accumulate, and I don't know what volume the whole sites uses. maybe old images (from like 2 years and backwards) can be deleted on some kind of automated cron job?

[Tech]

Well, I have repeatedly asked, spent ages re-editing peoples pictures then emailed them to ask them to keep the sizes down and its just getting daft now. Because people are uploading directly from their phones, people are literally snapping with their phone camera and uploading full size.

This is not rare, its fast becoming the norm and file uploads are getting to be over 3mb per image, 90% of the time.

Some members like yourselves are nice enough to reduce their file sizes prior to uploading but phone cameras just make it far too easy for people to be lazy and do nothing, they just expect it to be somebody else's problem.

The last time I went through them, I deleted over 100 images that had been uploaded within the last weeks that were all 3mb or more. A few were close to 10mb.

It has absolutely nothing to do with people viewing them on their phones or people mobile phone data plans, it has everything to do with the storage and monthly traffic that I pay for.

I have asked, I have helped, emailed and its just being ignored. Oh and yeah, I do know full well that dimensions and file size are not directly related. Very well aware of that.

As for living in the 90's, I dont think so. In the 90's, on dialup, 100kb was the equivalent of what people are doing today by uploading 10mb attachments, or 1 page of posts that had 45mb of images attached to it less than a week ago. I had to delete every single image in every post on a thread.

100kb per image is plenty to keep things fast and the bills down. I literally had to order new memory for the server last week at a cost of £150+vat to stop things grinding to a halt.

[jeremy1986]

@Tech. Is this a vps or dedicated server? Surely shared plans are more suitable, what with unlimited space these days. Combined with I assume not a huge amount of visitors in the site?

[Tech]

There is no such thing as "unlimited space nor "unlimited bandwidth". They dont exist. All of the big name hosts, they all oversell the crap out of shared servers and will give you about 10% max CPU usage before shutting you down and certainly will never, ever given a website 100GB of monthly traffic and 20GB of space with 200% CPU usage..

I'll also add, you need to stop trying to advertise your email address in your profile, I really dont have enough hours in the day to babysit you!

Your 1 click away from a permanent ban..

Looking at the montly traffic shows a pattern that matches the bigger image uploads. Around April/May 2016 the site was using around 40 to 45GB a month of traffic, then it started rising and 12 months later, in April 2017 its up to 75GB a month and by Nov 2017 its peaking at 99GB a month of traffic.

Don't forget, it take a LOT of memory and CPU power to deliver 99GB a month of database driven content. Its in the 90's every month now, so monthly data transfer is now more than double what it was 3 years ago.

Jan 15 it was never more than 30GB a month, at its peak, averaging around 15 to 25gb up to that point. So were now 3 times the monthly traffic of 4 years ago.

Averaging around 14k to 19k page views per day.

[Puffer]

Please appreciate that not all of us are sufficiently competent or knowledgeable to be able to reduce picture sizes successfully.   I entirely understand the need to do so but it ain't always easy!

A related point is the frequency with which a whole string of pics (of any size) or a lengthy chunk of text is fully repeated by any number of respondents when adding their two-euros-worth.   As long as there is a clear link to the original - not always apparent, especially when posts leapfrog - we really don't need to see it all over again.

[WenHH]

@TechCan We use photo hosting sites and put direct links to them instead of uploading pics here ? Would that be much help for site performance and space using problems ?

Edited April 3, 2019 by WenHH

[at9]

Of course using external hosting will reduce site storage and bandwidth. It will also give broken links when  those photos are removed for any reason.

[WenHH]

1 hour ago, at9 said:

Of course using external hosting will reduce site storage and bandwidth. It will also give broken links when  those photos are removed for any reason.

Thanks and cheers. 

[Tech]

16 hours ago, WenHH said:

Can We use photo hosting sites and put direct links to them instead of uploading pics here ? Would that be much help for site performance and space using problems ?

Nope because:

A. Those websites go down quicker than the sun in winter and vanish faster than a dodgy market trader at the first sign of a trading stands visit.

B. This also means that the links can potentially be replaced with inappropriate content or malware which then show up as coming from this website and not the dodgy image hosting site that gets sold to hackers in the same way Android apps do.

If you upload it here, it stays here forever, doesn't get replaced for malware and doesn't need to be checked by mods & admins that we dont have.

On 3/31/2019 at 10:20 AM, Puffer said:

A related point is the frequency with which a whole string of pics (of any size) or a lengthy chunk of text is fully repeated by any number of respondents when adding their two-euros-worth.   As long as there is a clear link to the original - not always apparent, especially when posts leapfrog - we really don't need to see it all over again.

Yep, I'm getting real bored repeatedly removing them all and leaving behind the "Stop quoting the images too" message. Seems its not being seen or just being ignored.

[jeremy1986]

On 4/3/2019 at 11:39 PM, Tech said:

Yep, I'm getting real bored repeatedly removing them all and leaving behind the "Stop quoting the images too" message. Seems its not being seen or just being ignored.

When quoting an image, does it really duplicate the physical file? I assume it should use the same reference (src link), not so?

 

[Tech]

18 hours ago, jeremy1986 said:

does it really duplicate the physical file?

No, of course it doesn't, who told you it does?

[p1ng74]

18 hours ago, jeremy1986 said:

When quoting an image, does it really duplicate the physical file? I assume it should use the same reference (src link), not so?

 

I think Tech is trying to limit traffic, which gets multiplied with duplicate references to an image.  This is different from the physical storage of the image.  

[jeremy1986]

12 hours ago, p1ng74 said:

I think Tech is trying to limit traffic, which gets multiplied with duplicate references to an image.  This is different from the physical storage of the image.  

ah yes - makes sense! 

[Tech]

On 4/5/2019 at 2:23 AM, p1ng74 said:

I think Tech is trying to limit traffic, which gets multiplied with duplicate references to an image

Indeed. People quoting an image, or worse, a post with 10 images where each image is 3mb (This was done recently) and then people keep quoting the entire post many thread pages later means each page load = 30mb minimum... (Was closer to 70mb with all the other crap people kept quoting, plus, it just makes reading it all a horrible pain in the backside as people then have to keep scrolling forever to get past the stuff they have already seen.

[kikepa]

Excellent point, Tech.  I noticed I've done that in the past.  I endeavored to delete pictures in the replies today.