# Image File Sizes



## Dragoneer (Oct 11, 2006)

We are currently looking into filesize limits for digital imagery, promoting better usage of file compression and bandwidth usage. This is a bit of an informal poll for the moment and we're trying to collect information. Your opinion counts.

Currently, our bandwidth is nearing 25mbit at peak time and our bandwidth costs are skyrocketing. What was costing is $400 a month is now costing $600 as of this month, and is rising and rising. To be frank, certain users are using an incredible amount of bandwidth and it's stressing the limitations of our connection (and the stress levels of those behind the bandwidth).

We want to keep things fair, accessable and unburdening to all users. This is your chance to sound off as what you feel are acceptable filesize limits. Iin today's age copious amounts of hard drive space is both plentiful and cheap and the view of "what's large" is not what it used to be. Keep in mind, however, that when it comes to raw upload bandwidth a single 500K file is a massive bit of information and can stress our bandwidth. Now, imagine that file sent out 3,000 times... and suddenly you've transferred over 1.5GB of data, all for a single file.

That adds up swiftly when thousands of submissions uploaded in a single week. Especially when our daily upload limit tops 60GB in a single day.

So, we ask the question: _"Exactly when do you feel a filesize goes being 'fair' to 'holy shit, that's XBOX HUUUUUGE!'?"_


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## Hanazawa (Oct 11, 2006)

*RE: File Sizes*

Speaking specifically of image files, I presume?

I personally live in the dark ages of the internet, mentally, remembering back when I was on 28.8 - I still try to keep everything under 100kb. I understand that these are the days of high-speed (woohoo!) but I still think that for most intents and purposes 200kb is a reasonable limit on filesize. If your image dimensions are demanding higher than that 95% of the time, your dimensions are probably unwieldly.


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## Almafeta (Oct 11, 2006)

*RE: File Sizes*

Just out of curiousity, how hard would it be to code a meter into the control panel that would show the bandwidth we have used the past month or so, so we could police ourselves?  Not just raw numbers, but maybe with guidelines (very low, moderate, high, very high, oh dear lord help us, etc.).


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## Dragoneer (Oct 11, 2006)

*RE: File Sizes*



			
				Hanazawa said:
			
		

> Speaking specifically of image files, I presume?
> 
> I personally live in the dark ages of the internet, mentally, remembering back when I was on 28.8 - I still try to keep everything under 100kb. I understand that these are the days of high-speed (woohoo!) but I still think that for most intents and purposes 200kb is a reasonable limit on filesize. If your image dimensions are demanding higher than that 95% of the time, your dimensions are probably unwieldly.


Yes, this is only for image files -- MP3s are not included in this poll.


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## Suule (Oct 11, 2006)

*RE: File Sizes*

2 cents from me:

I do detailed, rich and colourful art. I'm not suprised that much of my art is 300-600kb in size ( Dimensions approx. 650 x 900 pixels 150 DPI) even when I use a LOT of compressing methods. Now capping the size at 500 or 400 or even 300 will render my art in 80% of the cases... flawed. Details and texturing will surely be lost due to resizing (even using the Lanczos filter).

I say that the 'cap' should be around 750kb-1000kb.


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## Dragoneer (Oct 11, 2006)

*RE: File Sizes*



			
				Almafeta said:
			
		

> Just out of curiousity, how hard would it be to code a meter into the control panel that would show the bandwidth we have used the past month or so, so we could police ourselves?  Not just raw numbers, but maybe with guidelines (very low, moderate, high, very high, oh dear lord help us, etc.).


I'm not sure, really. that'd be a better question for our coders.


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## Dragoneer (Oct 11, 2006)

*RE: File Sizes*



			
				Suule said:
			
		

> 2 cents from me:
> 
> I do detailed, rich and colourful art. I'm not suprised that much of my art is 300-600kb in size ( Dimensions approx. 650 x 900 pixels 150 DPI) even when I use a LOT of compressing methods. Now capping the size at 500 or 400 or even 300 will render my art in 80% of the cases... flawed. Details and texturing will surely be lost due to resizing (even using the Lanczos filter).
> 
> I say that the 'cap' should be around 750kb-1000kb.


I understand that, and that's why we're asking. Still, that's a trade off of the internet: quality -vs- availability.


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## Suule (Oct 11, 2006)

*RE: File Sizes*



			
				Dragoneer said:
			
		

> I understand that, and that's why we're asking. Still, that's a trade off of the internet: quality -vs- availability.



The best quality for viewing my art is... seeing it yourself. Using such sophisticated mediums give makes my scanner confused. 

But seriously. I did a lot of research and found that the current dimensions I'm using is a good trade in quality vs size. Mind you I use Corel Photopaint and Irfanview to optimize the JPG to the max (4:4:4 + Progressive + Optimized) and I advise people to use them too. It can cut down JPGs 40-100kb in sizes sometimes.


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## katayamma (Oct 11, 2006)

As someone who administers an ISP, I feel for you guys.  People just don't understand the impact of high resolution/low-compression images.  One of the things I have to do when coloring comics for the web is be careful how large the final image size is.  There are a lot of dial-up folk who don't want to wait 5 minutes for a comic to load.


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## SevenFisher (Oct 11, 2006)

I'd say I feel about 300k to 400k is rather too large, but that's just me.

Eventually I've used Fireworks, and opimitze my images - one was about 1MB but I managed to get it under 100KB and it still looks good....Then again it's B/W....

But still, I'm sure opimitze images would help you to get around less than 350k..? 

...I'm not helpful, am I? *hides*


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## Sukebepanda (Oct 11, 2006)

Since I used to upload to VCL, I'm still using their rule of when saving art (specifically in Photoshop)..

Do 'Save for Web..' and then selecting the quality to about 75%. It doesn't make that big of a difference, and can save a few 100 kb or so depending on the size of the image. 

So for me, when an image size is starting to go over 350kb or so, well that's just too big n.n;

I know people want to have their best version up and shown to everyone, but some just tend to forget that there are people paying for this site to be ran, and having such a large supply of large-file sizes can really bog down a server/bandwidth. Personally I always save a low-quality (for FA uploading) and high-quality(for storage on my PC) with every picture that I do.


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## Hanazawa (Oct 11, 2006)

*RE: File Sizes*



			
				Suule said:
			
		

> I do detailed, rich and colourful art. I'm not suprised that much of my art is 300-600kb in size ( Dimensions approx. 650 x 900 pixels 150 DPI) even when I use a LOT of compressing methods. Now capping the size at 500 or 400 or even 300 will render my art in 80% of the cases... flawed. Details and texturing will surely be lost due to resizing (even using the Lanczos filter).



A quick look at your gallery fails to uncover this rich, detailed artwork you describe, but nonetheless, if you're concerned about detail loss at smaller sizes, you might consider cropping out details and providing them separately. If your art is so large that people have to scroll to see it, who cares about the details? They're losing the overall impact.

/me is sad that 500kb+ is winning the poll right now


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## Cheeze (Oct 11, 2006)

Now I'm not sure if my opinion would be of any use, but here I go.
Most of my works never exceed 200 and those that do can have their dimensions reduced. But there sure are certain pictures that require either a larger scale or a greater amount of detail, sometimes both. Hell, it's not so easy to decide which size is too much, so I vote for the golden middle, 300k.


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## Suule (Oct 11, 2006)

*RE: File Sizes*



			
				Hanazawa said:
			
		

> A quick look at your gallery fails to uncover this rich, detailed artwork you describe,



If you want to suggest critique my gallery page is fit for it. Not the forum.



			
				Hanazawa said:
			
		

> but nonetheless, if you're concerned about detail loss at smaller sizes, you might consider cropping out details and providing them separately. If your art is so large that people have to scroll to see it, who cares about the details? They're losing the overall impact.



Why should I crop out details, paste them around the artwork (or submit separately), making the spectator lose the overall impact even more than (as you claim) they lose now.

Besides. FA provides "A smaller version" of the artwork if you have a special switch in the preferences turned off...


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## Denim (Oct 11, 2006)

Just to clarify, screen resolution in Windows is set to 75ppi. Viewing above that resolution on a monitor is moot, it makes no -real- difference. 

The difference comes in where the image is to be printed. That's when the required ppi needs to be higher, ideally 300ppi, for a clear, unpixelated, unstretched -print-. Monitors don't represent real space, so high ppi images are just compensating for print quality by increasing the actual number of pixels in the image, ie. making it larger in pixel height and length. 

Make your art whatever resolution you want, but for viewing on a monitor going above 75ppi will produce no noticable loss in quality. Unless you're going to zoom in all the way to stare at the pixelated juicy bits 

Try it. Fire up a jpg in PhotoShop and increase the 'resolution' of the image. Watch what happens to the image -size-.  If you're still concerned about losing quality then save your original for printing and create a second, screen resolution version for uploading. That coupled with minor compression and clever indexing and you're sorted. Your images don't have to lose any noticable quality at all...


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## Arshes Nei (Oct 11, 2006)

There really *isn't* a reason to have them too high res. Considering the amount of people upset about their art being redistributed, why in the world would you upload a hi res copy if you're aware someone takes it and posts it elsewhere. Granted, if you're not upset by reposting on image boards, I don't see why you would ever give the public free hi res art unless it's a tutorial or coloring thing.


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## Dragoneer (Oct 11, 2006)

Suule said:
			
		

> Why should I crop out details, paste them around the artwork (or submit separately), making the spectator lose the overall impact even more than (as you claim) they lose now.


Here we have one of your images with a somewhat large file size of *411K* (102MB of data transferred per 250 views). And another image compressed at a generous 75% ratio in Photoshop. The compressed file is 1/4th the file size, down to a simple *110K* (27MB of data transferred per 250 views). Overlay them in Photoshop and compare the two. The difference in quality is so miniscule you'd have to strain to tell the difference unless you zoomed in to 300 to 400%.

So, given this information, what exactly are the advantages of having the file size at four times the size for virtually the exact same image quality? For every 250 views, you'd save us 75MB of transfer rate. For one file.


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## Dragoneer (Oct 11, 2006)

Alternatively, there's another submission that I'm looking at right now

Stats of the image in question:
Original image: 711K x 2097 views. *Total bandwidth: 1.45GB*
Compressed image: 248K x 2097. *Total bandwidth: 520MB *

That's a huge amount of savings, and the difference in quality is not dramatic. In fact, it's subtle at best. I'm not naming the artist (to single anybody out), but over time, it's a pretty big difference as you can see.


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## Kaisanti (Oct 11, 2006)

I know this probably isn't that useful, but one of the things that I think is nessassary is to have the image viewable as a whole when seen at full size, on the screen. There is no need, unless it is a totally amazing picture with millions of detailed parts in it, to have a huge file that when seen full size requires lots of scrolling. The only real diviant from this is those images that are essentially several images in one. Like a character sheet or a file of several icons. Because then its not the over all image that matters but its different parts.

To keep file sizes down, in photoshop, I use 'save for web'. It keeps the quality while cutting down the size. None of my images have ever been mangled by it and it has a variety of pre-set settings. ^^

Just my thoughts.


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## Swampwulf (Oct 11, 2006)

*RE: File Sizes*



			
				Dragoneer said:
			
		

> Hanazawa said:
> 
> 
> 
> ...



Nor I assume, text files.
I can't imagine writing a piece that took up 500+k of space.
Maybe if I was Stephen King...


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## Sukebepanda (Oct 11, 2006)

Is that with using the 75% compression?

That's really good, even if it isn't  I can't imagine FA being like VCL in the fact that they 'screen' the images (i mean, I assume FA has a larger user base or more uploads anyways)

But to keep the file-sizes from being outrageously big is there a way to implement a sort of rule/limitation on size during Uploading? I get kinda annoyed when I click on a picture and I see that it's about 2000 x 2000 pixels in size, and huge, taking forever to load even with DSL, in those situations I just sadly close the window n.n; 



			
				Dragoneer said:
			
		

> Alternatively, there's another submission that I'm looking at right now
> 
> Stats of the image in question:
> Original image: 711K x 2097 views. *Total bandwidth: 1.45GB*
> ...


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## Ryuu Majin (Oct 11, 2006)

250 KB is enough! I still can see the artworks clearly. I hope someone would understand that not all network has a good net-speed *stares at 1 MB artworks*
I wanna see some good stuff, but hey, it's a computer, not a high-resolution artwork book X_x;


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## Dragoneer (Oct 11, 2006)

Sukebepanda said:
			
		

> Is that with using the 75% compression?
> 
> I get kinda annoyed when I click on a picture and I see that it's about 2000 x 2000 pixels in size, and huge, taking forever to load even with DSL, in those situations I just sadly close the window n.n;


Yeah, I compressed it with 75% as well.  That's what I use by default. Also, the larger, more spacious file sizes are... the more work the server is constantly doing.


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## Dragoneer (Oct 11, 2006)

blackdragoon said:
			
		

> oh geez. i wanna vote for something lower to help the site and all but my art style that i have developed wouldn't allow it.


Give me one single image of yours I will proove you dead wrong.


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## Sukebepanda (Oct 11, 2006)

Have you tried compressing them a bit using Photoshop? It really does help lower the filesize, without costing any of the detail. Before I knew about it I'd always save my art at the highest possible quality, but once joining VCL and having to follow their size rules, I learned of the 75% compression technique, which is a life-saver!



			
				blackdragoon said:
			
		

> oh geez. i wanna vote for something lower to help the site and all but my art style that i have developed wouldn't allow it. most of my newest colorations are nearing that 500k mark being that they are done in artrage as actual paintings and such. i have found that i am getting quite good at it and if it changes to anything lower alot of my pics will be too large for the site. i'm stuck between a rock and a hardplace. i wanna help make things easier and feel guilty for the vote i must make, but i must make it. i have just one question for you dragoneer; why is it that you haven't gotten any of those banner ads that most people don't mind having? surely that would help cover the cost.


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## Growly (Oct 11, 2006)

IMHO, there is no real reason art shouldn't be more than 900x900 pixels and 250 KB.
I try and keep pencil sketches and inks to 50-100K, color works under 200K.


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## Denim (Oct 11, 2006)

blackdragoon, no offense, I'm looking at your work right now and there's absolutely no excuse for 500+kb images. In fact, I'm wondering what on earth you did to get them that large to begin with! The loss of quality imminent from JPEG compression won't hurt your images and I'd prefer if FA remained banner-ad free, thanks.


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## blackdragoon (Oct 11, 2006)

sukebe i don't have photoshop. i wish i did but i don't. too much moneys. maybe in a few months, say around january, i'll have enough to get it, but for noow i don't. plus my comp is very old and can't hardly run anything at all unless it's from back when you didn't need an expansion card; i.e. graphics or sound cards. my comp only operates on it's motherboard with no extra features (it's 7 years old and has a pentium3). so sorry but i can't do things like that with it. i truely wish that i could though.


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## Sukebepanda (Oct 11, 2006)

http://www.irfanview.com/

Someone recommened that program in your situation, it's free and it should be able to convert/compress. I would suggest finding any sort of free program to use in image compression.

There's also Gimp (http://www.gimp.org/) which is just like PS except free and not as fancy. 




			
				blackdragoon said:
			
		

> sukebe i don't have photoshop. i wish i did but i don't. too much moneys. maybe in a few months, say around january, i'll have enough to get it, but for noow i don't. plus my comp is very old and can't hardly run anything at all unless it's from back when you didn't need an expansion card; i.e. graphics or sound cards. my comp only operates on it's motherboard with no extra features (it's 7 years old and has a pentium3). so sorry but i can't do things like that with it. i truely wish that i could though.


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## Denim (Oct 11, 2006)

Not having PhotoShop is a poor excuse.

www.xnview.com

Use that to edit and compress your files. It's fast, free and supports tons of formats. Honestly, I think some people are just losing sight of the fact that FA is a free service run on donations and hard work. Either we cut costs by being rational about submissions or we donate more. Which would you prefer?

As artists we should all be aware of the online posting norms, no excuses.


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## Teh Wuff (Oct 11, 2006)

Oh, it's a good thing this poll was set up.  ^^;  It reminds me how my images are too big... I looked at my biggest pic', which is 710 KB as a .png, and turned it into a .jpg at medium compression, making it 105 Kb.  That's almost one-seventh of the size and it looks exactly the same.  Well, I guess the reason I've been saving everything as .png is because my one friend "highly suggested" it, because .jpgs "kill color" and that he would never be caught dead using it.  And I'm the kind of person who listens to stuff like that instead of seeing for myself... :Ãž  Heh, well, I guess his eyes must be 1000 times better than mine or something.  Well, I'll go back and replace all my files with .jpgs.  Don't have anything else to do tonight, and every bit of space saved helps, I suppose.

I know on AIM there's a limit to how big your icon can be... refusing to take anything larger than a certain amount.  I dunno if that'd be a good idea for here or not, dunno if it'd tick off people or something.  But that's getting a little far ahead I guess, arf.


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## pyromancy (Oct 11, 2006)

Honestly, this being a free community, I had to stick with the 200Kb limit.  If you want to do larger images, that's cool, but you need to realize that that burden needs to be spread out.  If a user wanted to post an image that was larger than that, they are always free to post a link to the full size image at another site.  I have my own webspace that I could use for this purpose.  I see this as a way to get out there and be seen by people.  There's no rule saying you can only post an image here and why put a strain on a group who is just trying to help out an artistic community?  These guys do good for us, it's only fair to take some of the extraneous stress off of their wallets and onto your (our) own.  Maybe I'm alone in this, but when someone does you a favor, it's usually on their terms.  I don't see how this should be any different.


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## Denim (Oct 11, 2006)

I must say, I completely agree with pyromancy on this, he's not alone there.

Hosting large amounts of data with high traffic costs a lot of money and when donations don't cover it that money has to come from somewhere. We're lucky to have a place that caters to a niche group of artists just so that we can get our work online and have it viewed by others. Being ungrateful and making demands of the people who are kind enough to provide such an outlet isn't the smartest route you could go.


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## koinu (Oct 11, 2006)

As a non-artist (here at least), I'm kind of torn on this one.

I definitely agree that for 99% of submissions, 500KB is way beyond overkill. However, I would say I'm against any hard limits, having been on the wrong side of them a couple times. (Giant digital panoramas that far exceed 500KB even at low JPEG quality and less than 25% of the original resolution.)


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## Ahundred (Oct 11, 2006)

One problem I've noted as far as compression goes is people using J.P.E.G.s when they should be using G.I.F.s. G.I.F.s should be used for bare linework and solid color images. I see linework drawings saved as J.P.E.G.s that weigh as much as four hundred kilobytes and are still kind of chunky and blurry when a G.I.F. of the same picture would be one tenth the weight and would be a flawless version of the original image.


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## EV1LP1NK1 (Oct 11, 2006)

I agree.  I personaly don't post full sized originals (I think some artists do)

so...

with the exception of animations I'd have to say 500.  You can still get great quality and a good sized color pics at much smaller sizes even.


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## Bravo (Oct 11, 2006)

Put print quality versions on your own site. Web standard dpi is 75, anything over that for just monitor viewing is a waste of bandwidth for most of us.

"Save for web" is a wonderful tool, use it.

I believe VCL has their own optimizing process for uploads, I would look into that if some people aren't too compress-savvy.


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## lolcox (Oct 11, 2006)

350kb would be the highest I'd stick my thumb to, and that image better be a 1600 x 1200 wallpaper with lots of colors.

Being friends with a certain ferret kinda opens my eyes to a whole new insight.

I can understand not wanting to overcompress an image if it contains a LOT of RED (jpg never forgives), but there's stuff here, and elsewhere on the internet that could seriously do with a lot of proper compression.

As mentioned earlier, Irfanview and xnview are good for doing this.

The Gimp is even better for jpeg compression, since you can preview the results, tweak them to have the least available artifacting, tune settings to crush images like flies, and get the bandwidth saving going, before you even write that file to disk.
(Warning: If you are a Windows user, using Gaim 2.0 release candidates, and choose to install the Gimp, you will NEED to install either Gaim Portable, Gimp Portable, or Both. There is a GTK+ bug that is still unresolved that if you install the latest version of The Gimp with GTK+ 2.8.x in a normal manner, Gaim will no longer be able to connect to any of the services.)

And, for a moment, those of you who complain about "users not being able to see your art to the fullest", *go pay for a domain*, and host your high resolution stuff there. There's nothing stopping you from adding to the description, "For a high resolution version of this image, have a look at http://fhqwhg.ads/pics/come.on", is there? 

Did I just strike something? Yes. Someone is paying for your bandwith, as is. Be generous enough to, y'know, try compressing your images.


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## DarkMeW (Oct 11, 2006)

Personally I would want the ability to post some images that are 600KBs, but it would be incredibly rare that I would need that size of a file. Such large files, even on broadband, take a while to down load and you can forget about your dial up audience almost entirely. Some of my paintings, that I haven't posted for that reason, are over 4'x6' oil on canvas and without a large image file a lot of the detail is lost. Even if I wanted to post a large file I would make a smaller version for dial ups and have a larger rez version on my site. Even with the large version, to protect from art theft, it's not a max rez version, just high enough that I think the detail shows. (It's a lot easier to prove art theft when you can provide a larger rez version then the thief can.)

600KB would be a nice max bar, but even 500kb is far more then most users should be using. I often have seen people send high rez versions of a pencil doodle for absolutly no reason other then lazyness. I know it would be a pain to code in but a limiter bar for when you up load a image file would help show such users that it's far to large. 100kb to 200kb would be in the green, 200kb to 300kb yellow, 300kb to 400kb orange, 400kb to 500kb red, and 500kb and above a siren goes off and Scooty from Star Trek yells "we canna a do it! The engine canna a take anymore!"


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## blackdragoon (Oct 11, 2006)

i'll start working on it tomorrow night guys i promise. a big thanx to damaratus for helping me out on this one. but the stuff he is sending is taking forever and won't finish with the file transfer for atleast another 5-6 hours. and then i have work in the morning. so i promise to start trying to compress all my works that need it by atleast midnight (central timezone) tomorrow dragoneer. if my computer can support what he's sending me that is....i hope. 

but i know not why some of you were biting my head off when i still voted for less than almost everyone else at the time.


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## Dragoneer (Oct 11, 2006)

Teh Wuff said:
			
		

> Well, I guess the reason I've been saving everything as .png is because my one friend "highly suggested" it, because .jpgs "kill color" and that he would never be caught dead using it.


JPG does kill color, that's correct... but it really doesn't matter if you're using it on the internet. Never save print-copies as JPGs. That's crazy-talk. =D


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## Cybergarou (Oct 11, 2006)

I've taken a look at my images and could definately get them down towards 200kb and below with scaling and compression, and will be doing so cause I don't see a reason not to.

I will throw a thought out there to be chewed on. How about permitting one image with higher resolution. A check could be done on the user's images before uploading to see if there are any above the size limit in which case the upload would be halted. When they reduce the size of those images they can then upload the larger image.

I'll also comment on off site linking. That works great when people have their own domains like myself. But if a large number of people feel a need to make links to larger images off site, chances are most of them won't be using their own domain. Then you run into issues of bandwidth stealing. If enough people use the same domain to do this it will be noticed by the web administrator of that domain and this site would be flagged as responsible. This could lead to issues with that domain, the worst case being legal action.

If you want to promote off site linking for images then it would be a good idea to ask around to see if there are any users here who would be willing to let people post on their domain, letting them set the guidelines for what's acceptable or how it's done. This could be a way for people to give back to the community.


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## Shadou Kitsune (Oct 11, 2006)

I'm not real active in submissions but when I do I try not to have intensely large files. On average my file sizes are 175.97 KB (rounded up), largest file being 349 KB and smallest being 20.5 KB (using only the first 10 images visible on my gallery without going into my whole gallery).

I'd probably say that 200-300 can be a good limit, but I wouldn't be following that really well at the current moment. If I changed the file format that I save my images in, I could probably top out at 200-300 KB/image. If I resized, I could cut that down a little more as well (though most of what I do will usually be nowhere near 900 x 900 pixels and the only ones that will exceed that are oC sessions with others which may not be real frequent now-and-days).


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## Voln (Oct 12, 2006)

I think 450kb should be the absolute limit, but it would probably be better if the limit were even smaller.


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## emptyF (Oct 12, 2006)

i never even thought about my file sizes until you mentioned it.  turns out most of mine are under 100k . . . 150 was the max.  go figure.  it's probably because i suck.  oh well, at least i'm not a bandwidth hog.


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## Shira (Oct 12, 2006)

I've voted for 400KB; I know a lot of artists who prefer posting high-quality (and high res) pics that are 250+ KB, so 400 seems like a good compromise, at least in my mind.

Whatever is decided, though, I'd say that a file size limit should replace the existing dimension cap; I've seen pictures that really do need to be more than 1280x1280, while they still remain of a reasonable file size. But, that's my two cents worth. And if this has already been addressed in the thread, I apologize for repeating something; I'm too tired to read. @_@


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## blackdragoon (Oct 12, 2006)

oops my bad dragoneer. my pics aren't that bad on filesize. my mistake. i  was thinking of some of the pics i'm currently working on that i accidently saved as the default filetype for the program i use (.ptg) which is why their sizes are so big. but i haven't uploaded them yet so i'll just change the filetype before i do. *i am so stupid sometimes, i swear, most my pics i have in there now are less than 50k and i didn't even realise it, however there are a few that will need compression regardless* please forgive my stupidity dragoneer. as i only have 5 that are a little over 500. just a bit.

on the plus side i am glad i made that mistake cuz i got some free software out of it from a good friend of mine. *does the happy dance*

and shira: for someone who is very talkative in real life you sure are quiet on the net. lurking is lame my friend, post more often or i shall go to your house and make you.....(lawlz i no where you live and you....er, um wait, you know where i live too...)


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## Rave (Oct 12, 2006)

I can see why people don't like the idea of seeing the 500K size winning the poll and I personally think even 400K is too much most of the time. But it's interesting to think that, if such a hard limit of 500K was in fact set, even that generous level of file size allowance would probably cut down on a lot of the bandwidth problems. Instead, we have a much less strict standard and crazy image sizes are being uploaded for usually no good reason. Whatever we ultimately decide on, that does need to change. 

On the other hand...when it comes to compression, I do have mixed feelings. It so quickly turns into a "Here, I'll compress your file and 'prove' how great it looks compressed so much more than you choose to compress it. SEE?!? END Of DISCUSSION." kind of thing. Maybe I just "see" differently or whatever, but I could have sworn that level 7 or so compression in Photoshop 5 does not-so-nice things to at least some of my images, whatever anyone else has to say about it. Yet, in the past, folks have compressed my images down even further as if to enlighten me and insist that there is no difference and I'm simply "wrong" if I think otherwise. 

That's a little pushy and a little annoying too when I generally keep almost all my files down to below 300K as it is, whatever the compression level used, and usually even fall below 200K. I think I sometimes get adverse results at such levels of compression partly due to using relatively small canvas sizes to begin with relative to most artists, (I have my reasons for doing so.) but then, that is probably why my file sizes stay small to begin with. Even if I didn't compress at all beyond initial full quality JPEG compression, my file sizes would probably remain at or below 300K most of the time. Even so, I DO compress beyond that level, yet...there will always be someone out there who thinks it could stand one more level and then maybe another, or another level of compression just on some sort of general principle of the thing standard - "But...but...you MUST compress more, even if the file is already very small...because...well, because you CAN. It's the law of the Intarweb!!"Â Â 

So, making the discussion about compression standards rather than file sizes gets a little touchy for me as an artist. We don't all use large canvas sizes with relatively heavy compression. Some prefer the opposite approach and still manage to get similarly small, maybe even smaller than usual, file sizes. If I can get my files usually below 200K, how much more they could, in theory, be compressed if strained to the breaking point or whatever should be beside the point. Geeks can debate ideal compression rates forever if they like, but I just want to be aware of what file size I am posting and be responsible in my uploading habits accordingly. 

I think the time has indeed come for more strict file size limitations, but the standard should be based on the final file size, which is something solid and relatively easy to decide on and enforce, and not on something as potentially even more controversial and subjective as trying to decide what compression rates or file formats should be used for various kinds of pics.


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## Bokracroc (Oct 12, 2006)

400k max.
When you can fit a 4 minute animated flash with SFX and music (2:12) in around 550kb (550x400) you shouldn't really need much larger for a stock standard image. Photoshop and Irfanview do an excellent job at compression with minimal loss.


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## chicago-lollie (Oct 12, 2006)

Growly said:
			
		

> IMHO, there is no real reason art shouldn't be more than 900x900 pixels and 250 KB.


Long one-off comics - the ones that have a little more to them, but would have less impact as a two-page piece.

I've had a couple of comics that ended up being 1800+ in height, and only 720 wide at most. Even with 70% quality, the filesize can end up at almost 600kb. 500kb at 60%. Any less, and the loss of quality really starts to show through, moreso if there's any red in the image.

...Which makes me a bandwidth guzzler. I hit 500kb+, but after reading the thread, I kinda wish I had at least hit 400kb instead. :D;;


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## Mitch_DLG (Oct 12, 2006)

Near-perfect image compression is not only possible, it's very easy.  I'll submit this http://www.furaffinity.net/view/70560/ as evidence that you can have very high, clear detail, in a  small file size, say, 160K.  

That's 75% in "save for web."  Now while I realize that not everyone has Photoshop, as people have said, Ifranview and Gimp both can do the same thing.

For those of you who say that image compression kills your images, I'd like to say, "Hogwash."  Well, that and technically in mathematical terms it does hurt the image, but, as the web prettymuch runs at 72 DPI, and all anything above that res does is make the image appear bigger on the screen, I don't see much reason that you'd need a file over 300K for an image ever.  If it's too large, break it up.  Or, see if special permission can be made for oversized images.

My point is, don't be afriad of minor image compression.  I don't think I have ANYTHING in my gallery over 260K, and most is 120K or under, and they all look fine and dandy so much that I'm still happy looking at them after staring at the 600 dpi monster version I just finished creating.  

300K is more than enough.  500k is simply rediculous for a flat, non-Flash image file.


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## Suule (Oct 12, 2006)

Dragoneer said:
			
		

> Here we have one of your images with a somewhat large file size of *411K* (102MB of data transferred per 250 views). And another image compressed at a generous 75% ratio in Photoshop. The compressed file is 1/4th the file size, down to a simple *110K* (27MB of data transferred per 250 views). Overlay them in Photoshop and compare the two. The difference in quality is so miniscule you'd have to strain to tell the difference unless you zoomed in to 300 to 400%.
> 
> So, given this information, what exactly are the advantages of having the file size at four times the size for virtually the exact same image quality? For every 250 views, you'd save us 75MB of transfer rate. For one file.



Durrr... I should've posted this a jpg not as png. My mistake.


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## RailRide (Oct 12, 2006)

I go from 2550x3300 24MB originals to 750x1000 130-160K Web versions for the comics I'm working on right now (and I don't have _PhotoShop_). True, there is some artifacting in the end result (less so if there are more intricate patterns), but as has been said before, putting up print-quality artwork on the Web (especially in a community as concerned as this one is about art theft) is just slightly south of insane. Why circumvent your ability to sell prints if your artwork is _that_ detailed?

In the interim, how about a means of seeing resolution and filesize in the mouseover, before you click an image? That way artists who assume all their viewers have uber-fat pipe broadband and huge monitors can wonder where all their pageviews went.:wink:

---PCJ


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## JTigerclaw (Oct 12, 2006)

Not only do I sympathize with those who are taking money from their own wallets to pay for all this bandwidth, I notice that this site runs much slower than every other site I frequent, and understandably so.  Lowering file sizes of submitted image files would be a great idea.  

I never submit any art that is over 200kb.  The Save for Web function in Photoshop works great (as do those alternative versions I'm sure), and personally, I think huge, detailed images look best when you can see it all on the screen at once.  The rich details look even more detailed when the image is smaller.  So I wouldn't think it would be all that bad to upload pics at no longer or taller than 800 px.  Not saying that should be a limit too, but the effect of the artwork is the same at these smaller dimensions, which makes the files even smaller with file compression.  There really is no excuse for files over 300kb in size.  They only steer me away from viewing them.


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## dave hyena (Oct 12, 2006)

No more than 250kb I think.

There's just no need to have it bigger.

If it is so important to have an image larger than that, one can find web hosting for it. Photobucket has a 1mb allowence & 1gb of space for example.


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## Thaily (Oct 12, 2006)

1600x1200 desktop wallpapers usually don't exceed the 400k and there's not much in the way of valid reasons to make images bigger than that other than poor resizing etc.

I voted 400k.


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## lzeringue (Oct 12, 2006)

I just wanted to say that I accidentally clicked 500KB, but I think that would be a reasonable CAP for filesizes.  I mean, I just uploaded a jpeg full of blue, which looks fine and takes up a good 2/3 of the screen... which is only about 50KB.  However, I do know some artists whose art is detailed enough to nessesitate a large filesize.  However, most of these users only post art once in a long long while, because they spend near to 50 hours on each piece.  They're most certainly probably not the users you're talking about.

There's also the matter of screen resolution, and I definately agree with putting on a limit.  The fact of the matter is, if I can't view the whole image in  my screen, there's no point to the high resolution anyway... because I'll have to go save it and do a zoom out if I want to see the whole stupid thing.  You're not running a kinkos- you guys are running an art gallery.

I do have some thoughts on the matter, however, that if you're getting trouble from certain users, crack down on them.  Don't ponder making the whole site restricted for all users if you can take it up with the individuals first.

Another idea?  Kill the Furaffinity banner being on EVERY SINGLE PAGE and just put it on the home page.  I personally don't like seeing it or having to load it every time I load the pages anyway, as I am on dialup.  I know it's small, but I wonder how much bandwidth is getting eaten on everyone on the site CONSTANTLY reloading the banner.  Replacing that with text everywhere but the homepage could be a very good idea that you're overlooking.


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## PhoenixDragon (Oct 12, 2006)

Dragoneer said:
			
		

> Overlay them in Photoshop and compare the two. The difference in quality is so miniscule you'd have to strain to tell the difference unless you zoomed in to 300 to 400%.



Miniscule enough that I had to check the file properties to make sure I hadn't opened the same image twice! heh.

When I read this, I got to worrying a little about the size of my own images. I tend to make my full-color pieces at around 1024x768, as it seems like a good, round resolution, and is about 75dpi. So I was worrying, maybe my images are a bit on the big side. Ends up, my start on a small mailing list, with rather tight bandwidth, made a good habit that stuck with me. Despite the size, and even having to knock down the compression on several images to deal with all the red coloring in some of them (Which JPEG seems to HATE!), they still are 100-200K, averaging near the middle.

Seems 200 would be nice, but I'm voting 250 to allow a little more wiggle room. I'd prefer if there's a way to post larget pics, if necessary, just in case you have something that NEEDS it, but I have no idea how that'd work.

While I rarely check file sizes on other people's work, this got me to check on a few, and I've been amazed at the bloat some of the files have, because they seem to have no reason to be that big. They don't look any better than the other ones that are a quarter their size. So many people seem to just set the quality slider to "maximum" when saving as a jpeg, and leave it at that.

I'm also rather dissapointed that 500K+ is winning, but I take some comfort that the majority of votes are between 200 and 400K...


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## Catamount (Oct 12, 2006)

if you guys do put a limit on file sizes, (which I think is probably a good idea) you should have a somewhat detailed guide on saving images in case somebody doesn't know how to compress images properly...I think its nice of sites that will compress the image for you and ask you if you'd like to use that image too, that might be a neat idea as long as you could see it full size.  This 'feature' be a little hard on the coders...but hey they like that right?

and for wallpapers, maybe there could be a higher limit for those? especially considering there isn't very many of them and people have ridiciously high desktop sizes.


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## LaserBeams (Oct 12, 2006)

Registered to vote  400k, cause I didn't want to say 500+.

As a bit of an optimization freak, and understanding the costs, I think we do need a reasonable cap.Â Â 200k is too small, IMHO, for larger works, but there are very few good reasons for a picture to go over 400k.Â Â There are ways to do it, obviously, but often just choosing a different file type (dark solid toony line art + JPG = bad idea, smooth colors + GIF = bad idea) can fix the problem.

Religiously using a single file type (I've seen PNG zealotry), or a single high setting on all images is fine - on your own site, if you want to pay for it. But unless you're pouring a ton of donations into FA, it's selfish to do that here.

Personally, when I compress images, I usually go with a 7 or 8 in PS, and if it's too big for my taste, I start high, then work my way down till I can start to see noticeable flaws in it, then back off a bit. That usually gets a nice compromise - and that's really what this is all about.

(Edit: And because I'm picky... when it comes to displaying pictures on the web, DPI is essentially irrelevant. An image pixel is a display pixel in a browser. If you want to say 8x8 inches at 75 DPI, that's fine, but it's equivalent to 600x600 pixels. 75 DPI by itself with no dimensions is meaningless, as is 8x8 inches with no DPI. This all goes out the window with text layouts and CSS, but for images it still holds true.)


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## Suule (Oct 12, 2006)

Okay posting last night at 3 AM wasn't the wisest idea, so I will give a full explanation why I think the cap should be around 500kb-650kb...  First of all... the formats...

JPG: is a good format when it comes to smooth gradient colourful shading, best achived with using digital media. 

In scanning real media, there are few things JPG hates: 

1. Paper texture - Paper texture usually makes the image larger due to the fact it adds additional tones. You can reduce that by using the blur filter in scanning soft ( significant lose of sharpness ) or using descreen filters in the scanning software.

2. Non-smooth shading - If you don't use a smooth shading but cross-line one, you might experience increase in the file-size. This may prove frustrating if you want to make fur looking like fur with brush/pencil strokes. JPG doesn't like that.

3. Extensive mixing of tones and colours - unlike digital media, controling how the colour is being mixed with traditional media is hard. There may be tiny specks of pigments that get scanned in and make the JPG compression see them as 'additional colours' when it comes to tearing down image into those tiny squares (okay, enough technical stuff here).

It's wise to load the image into Irfanview later on and use the JPG Loseless Operations plug-in - try to optimize the file with it (SAVE A BACKUP BEFORE DOING THAT), it may crunch the file more.

PNG: Flat shading, vector graphics, linework. Offers better compression than GIF, but be sure to use things like  OptiPNG and pngcrush to optimize the PNG cause many programs save a lot of useless metadata in PNG files.

GIF: 256-colour Animations only. That's the only thing I can think of.

As for me. I scan art at 150x150 DPI producing a 1273x1753 pixel picture (a little more than A4, since 90% of my work is done on B4 and similar paper sizes). I resize it under Irfanview using Lanczos filter (cut in half, for better quality. When it comes to scaling up/down, don't use real numbers, only integers), then add a watermark into Corel Photopaint and crunch the JPG using optimizing and progressive saving. Still for some odd reasons some images come up with sizes up to 650 Kb regardless of those operations. It may be caused by the things I pointed out ealier. Reviewing my image folder I've found only 3 images that are exceeding the 500 kb limit. Most of my images are under 500 kb. 

But still I think it'd be safer to give a cap greater than some people try to force, to aviod the infamous "640 Kb is enough for everybody mistake"


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## Sslaxx (Oct 12, 2006)

Â£300+ a month? That's just insane. Nearly Â£4k a year! Methinks 400k should be the absolute, hard limit for uploads. Perhaps you could implement a daemon that'll automatically resize/recompress images above the 1280x1280 limit and/or 400k?


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## Suule (Oct 12, 2006)

Dude... anything but bots reviewing artwork. VCL has shit like that and it sucks.


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## siansilverhair (Oct 12, 2006)

I submit at a resolution of 500px wide and generally since most of my drawings are square, about 500-800px long.  My drawings rarely exceed 50kb -- I use GIMP, 75% jpg quality with the 1x1x1 filter type setting (I can't remember sorry).  They seem well compressed on my monitor, but I have a feeling that .jpg artifacts leak through on brighter monitors.

I'm also on dialup half the time currently, so the smaller, the better.

150kb is probably more than enough, even for OMG HIGH DETAIL RESOLUTION shots (which I don't think most people bother with anyway.


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## lzeringue (Oct 12, 2006)

Suule said:
			
		

> Dude... anything but bots reviewing artwork. VCL has shit like that and it sucks.



Uh.  Actually, aside from the bots initially checking compression, the images are reviewed by people... how could a bot check a piece of artwork?  That would have to be AI more sophisticated than any in EXISTANCE.  There's also the fact that I have a VCL, and I once wrote on a piece of artwork's description, that a certain image should NOT be put into sketches because of "off colored background" (it was on yellow paper).  Ch'marr wrote me concerning the fact that I could've worded it more nicely, as saying something like that makes the admins look stupid; like they can't recognize colored paper.  (... Probably just one of the reviewers being whiney, because I've had a lot of conversations with Ch'marr for various reasons, and he's a cool guy.)


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## Suule (Oct 12, 2006)

By reviewing I meant: checking size, compression, noise and fixing it as quoted here:



> Perhaps you could implement a daemon that'll automatically resize/recompress images above the 1280x1280 limit and/or 400k?



I'm against any art-modifiing art-checking bots. They're not producing sufficent results.


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## lzeringue (Oct 12, 2006)

Suule said:
			
		

> By reviewing I meant: checking size, compression, noise and fixing it as quoted here:
> 
> 
> 
> ...



Ooouh.  Oh.  Yeah, no automated "fixing" of images.  That would blow.  Although the VCL's bot works in a way that you can go fix it yourself.  Basically it says, "this is poorly compressed- use this one (link to auto-recompressed image) or please go recompress it yourself".  That would be fine, if you ask me, as it would make users go compress their images properly.


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## Calorath (Oct 12, 2006)

I simply do not have enough time to read all the comments in this thread. So I apologize ahead of time if I repeat something that has already been stated.

Perhaps not only taking a closer look at image sizes FA should adopt an image standard. It would appear that a lot of people are using this site as their own personal image archive. Posting RL pics, stupid meme's (I've been guilty of it myself once or twice) and so on. For example, someone uploaded pictures of their transformers toys... I don't see how images like these are relevant to an art community site. 

Not that the file size limit is a bad idea and hey, perhaps if you want to upload large high quality images, a $50 donation per year account could be set up? That way those who truly want to support the site can, and reap benefits from their generosity.

That's all.


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## lzeringue (Oct 12, 2006)

Calorath said:
			
		

> I simply do not have enough time to read all the comments in this thread. So I apologize ahead of time if I repeat something that has already been stated.
> 
> Perhaps not only taking a closer look at image sizes FA should adopt an image standard. It would appear that a lot of people are using this site as their own personal image archive. Posting RL pics, stupid meme's (I've been guilty of it myself once or twice) and so on. For example, someone uploaded pictures of their transformers toys... I don't see how images like these are relevant to an art community site.
> 
> ...



They were probably personally modified transformers.  I know a LOT of people who mod their toys, and they can be very giddy about it.  Quality standard checks, however, are counterproductive to any art community that wants to help growing artists, and not just existing, already talented artists who want attention more than critique.


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## Tes (Oct 12, 2006)

The majority of my images are under 200k however I do have a gargantuan 460-something k image with the red and the textures and things (I hate jpg articles, and they really liked this image).
I think that there should be the chance to have a few larger size files in your gallery if for the most part you are well behaved.


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## Calorath (Oct 12, 2006)

I don't care. Furaffinity is not Photobucket. I want to see FURRY art. Not some fat shit eating a corndog.



			
				lzeringue said:
			
		

> Calorath said:
> 
> 
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## CyberFoxx (Oct 12, 2006)

Personally, I've been going through my whole collection of Furry/Anime artwork that I've collected over the years (12GB and growing.) and I've been using two tools on the files, jpegoptim and optipng. (Yes, these are command-line tools. I'm not afraid of the command-line, and neither should you!)

Jpegoptim works by optimizing the huffman tables of the JPEG file. This is all done losslessly. And judging by the output, Adobe products are quite wasteful when it comes to the huffman tables. I've even saved 600KB, each, on certain anime wallpapers that were done in an Adobe product. (By Adobe product, I'm meaning one which puts "Adobe" in the EXIF metadata.) There seems to be a Win32 port of jpegoptim, but I can't find a binary of it hosted anywhere. I found it in the Gentoo Portage, and other Linux distributions seem to have it in their repositories too at least.

Optipng (http://optipng.sourceforge.net/) is a based off of PNGCrush. I like it because it's just a bit faster than PNGCrush, but produces pretty much the same quality of output. It does alot to optimize PNGs as well, like lossless transforming a 24-bit greyscale image down to "real" greyscale. (There goes about half the size of the image right there, with no quality loss.) It can also convert GIFs to PNG as well. I've, had mixed results with this though. Sometimes, the GIFs are still smaller than the PNG, but most of the time I still kept the PNG over the GIF.

The only sugestions I can give are:

1. 72 DPI, 72 DPI, 72 DPI! Please! We don't need anything higher than that if you're sharing your artwork. Keep the 10000000 DPI version for yourself, but lower that sucker down to 72 DPI when you share it.

2. You took the time to draw/create that artwork, right? Can you also take the time to see what works better on it, JPEG or PNG? There has been some cases where I got some images in PSD format and I've conveted them to JPEG and PNG, and sometimes the PNG was smaller, othertimes the JPEG. And to be honest, I haven't really noticed a pattern on what type of image (Sketch, flat color, vivid color, etc) compresses better with either one. It actually seems pretty random to me.

3. Unless you used some colored pencil (Blue perhaps?) to make that sketch, share that image as greyscale. Trust me, there goes about half the resulting filesize right there.

4. Watch that image resolution! Here's a hint, not everybody is running a 30" LCD Widescreen display at some weird 5000x3000 screen resolution. (I myself own a good ol' NEC 17" CRT running at 1152x864.) That means your image shouldn't be that big either. Sure, I admit it's nice getting a high-resolution image from time to time, but it's not really needed. Try to keep the image so it still looks good at a screen resolution of 1024x768 without a huge amount of scrolling. Some scrolling is fine, just not five screen widths/heights worth, OK? Share the reasonablely sized one, and keep the high resolution copy for yourself or anybody that wishes to have a copy of it if they ask for it.

5. I will not suggest JPEG "Quality" settings. Why? Because each product that saves as JPEG has a different meaning as to what that setting does. 85% in one program, might equal to 75% in another. Best suggestion, look and ask around the net. There's bound to be somebody that's found the best quality setting for that program that trades quality for filesize. Or just do some experiaments yourself. Just remember, anything over 95% tends to be overkill, and just results in too big of a file with no reasonable quality improvment.


That's about all I can suggest for now. Sure, some people might disagree with me, and that's fine! Guess what, I'm not an artist, or an expert in compression theory, I don't know everything! I'm just a stickler for trying to keep filesizes small while keeping quality. I've been that way since my old DOS days on my 8088. Although, I admit that with audio, I'd take a Lossless Flac over a Lossy MP3 any day. ^_^


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## Evol (Oct 12, 2006)

In my opinion, keep large versions of your pieces on your website.  For galleries that you don't own, keep things under 300k.  There shouldn't be any reason to submit an image that's over 1200x1200 pixels.  Hell, Kacey kept this highly detailed piece to 562x1280: http://www.furaffinity.net/full/95170/


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## Evol (Oct 12, 2006)

Calorath said:
			
		

> I don't care. Furaffinity is not Photobucket. I want to see FURRY art. Not some fat shit eating a corndog.



Please, for the love of god, don't put "furry" and "fat shit" in the same statement ever again.  :cry::cry::cry::cry::cry:


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## Suule (Oct 12, 2006)

Evol said:
			
		

> In my opinion, keep large versions of your pieces on your website.  For galleries that you don't own, keep things under 300k.  There shouldn't be any reason to submit an image that's over 1200x1200 pixels.  Hell, Kacey kept this highly detailed piece to 562x1280: http://www.furaffinity.net/full/95170/



The only reason I can think of when submitting a large image (1600x1200) is a highly-detailed wallpaper. But seriously... 900 pixels in height is the max IMO


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## Calorath (Oct 12, 2006)

Awww *hugs*  I mean no disrespect to the pudgy people. I just hate corndogs. 




			
				Evol said:
			
		

> Calorath said:
> 
> 
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## Seniltai (Oct 12, 2006)

To get back at the daemon idea, doing that process fully automated would ruin a lot of artwork, so that wouldn't be a good idea. I think the best way to reduce size, is by giving the uploader a side by side comparison on full size whether the compression is too harmful that FurAffinity applies. You could make that process even more dynamic, by adding a slider which controls compression level on the upload page itself. (for the Devs: Doesn't  GD2 have JPEG compression functionality? Else you could try ImageMagick...) That way the uploader can make the best quality/size tradeoff, or when everything fails to produce a good enough image, they should be able to upload the image without any compression whatsoever (but limited to x amount of kilobytes).



> Jpegoptim works by optimizing the huffman tables of the JPEG file. This is all done losslessly. And judging by the output, Adobe products are quite wasteful when it comes to the huffman tables. I've even saved 600KB, each, on certain anime wallpapers that were done in an Adobe product. (By Adobe product, I'm meaning one which puts "Adobe" in the EXIF metadata.) There seems to be a Win32 port of jpegoptim, but I can't find a binary of it hosted anywhere. I found it in the Gentoo Portage, and other Linux distributions seem to have it in their repositories too at least.



How much time does it take to optimize? If it's less than a second you could do it automatically after the upload process, else let a bot do it. Because it's lossless it shouldn't harm image quality in any way, so why not?

Basically it means that if you want to decrease file size you have to increase the CPU workload, but in return you'll get lower bandwidth costs and less disk space costs, haven't got a clue what your server(s) current cpu workload is, so can't give any recommendations there...

Well, that were the ideas that sprang to mind here, hope it's useful to you guys =)


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## Suule (Oct 12, 2006)

Seniltai said:
			
		

> How much time does it take to optimize? If it's less than a second you could do it automatically after the upload process, else let a bot do it. Because it's lossless it shouldn't harm image quality in any way, so why not?
> 
> Basically it means that if you want to decrease file size you have to increase the CPU workload, but in return you'll get lower bandwidth costs and less disk space costs, haven't got a clue what your server(s) current cpu workload is, so can't give any recommendations there...
> 
> Well, that were the ideas that sprang to mind here, hope it's useful to you guys =)



JPGOptimize made my images bigger  

About 10% average.

Dunno why, maybe because I used some optimizing techniques ealier


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## chicago-lollie (Oct 12, 2006)

Sslaxx said:
			
		

> Perhaps you could implement a daemon that'll automatically resize/recompress images above the 1280x1280 limit and/or 400k?


I have a feeling that the underlined part already exist, because I've had a number of pieces automatically resized upon submission.

...which, since this thread has made me think, is really just because of my own bias towards higher resolution images (1000 wide max, for a 1280Ã—1024 screen resolution, which gives room for additional site sidebars without having to resort to horizontal scrolling) and tall one-page comics. :D;;

A random thought on image resolutions though - which doesn't really relate to the poll, but because we're talking limit-caps here... Instead of having the resolution limits work on terms of "If height and/or width exceeds value: 1280", would it be possible work off the full pixel count instead?

By this, I mean making the auto-resize work by multiplying the height count by width, then checking if the result exceeds 1,638,400 - the total amount of pixels in a 1280Ã—1280 image.


I decided to try and work out this idea: An example scenario which, if you can follow it, shows what I'm trying to get across.
[size=xx-small]Maximum Limits
*Cap Height:* 1280
*Cap Width:* 1280
*Cap Total:* 1638400 (1280Ã—1280)

An image is submitted...
*Received Height:* 2000
*Received Width:* 1000
*Received Total:* 2000000 (2000Ã—1000)
// Okay, so a 2000-high image is a little extreme. Let's just say that this example image is a detailed vertical banner that "needs" to be seen at a big size.

*Difference between Cap Total and Received Total:* 361600

Reducing the image
*Divide Difference by 1280:* 282.5
*Divide 282.5 by 100:* 2.825
*Find a suitable percentage for reduction (2.825 Ã— 3.6):* 10.17%
*Resulting H/W Percentage Size (100% - 10.17%):* 89.83%
*Resulting Decimal Size:* 0.8983
// Something to note, there would need to be a minimum of 1% size reduction to ensure that the resolution gets reduced to a number under the 1638400 pixel count, so a "Fixed Decimal Cap: 0.9900 (99%)" would need to be specified.

Final Submitted File
*Altered Height:* 1796.6
*> Round Down:* 1796
*Altered Width:* 898.3
*> Round Down:* 898
*Altered Total:* 1612808 (A loss of 25592 pixels)[/size]

And _then_, the image could be optimized down to a level that keeps the file size at a preferred limit, 300kb for automatic resize. However (and this is working in some of the other ideas posted above), in the submission window, if the image has been resized, it could give you the option of either using the automatically optimized file, or to resubmit a optimized file with a recommended height and width of *???* by *???* (In this case, *1796* by *898* as calculated by the automatic resizing from before), with a file size no greater than 350/400/whatever-kb.




...So, er. How's that? :D;;


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## CyberFoxx (Oct 12, 2006)

Seniltai said:
			
		

> How much time does it take to optimize? If it's less than a second you could do it automatically after the upload process, else let a bot do it. Because it's lossless it shouldn't harm image quality in any way, so why not?



jpegoptim is fast, really fast. On my Celeron D 2.93Ghz (OC'd to 3.12Ghz), it never takes more than 2secs to optimize a JPEG. Very small memory footprint too. And the cool thing is, by default, if the output is larger, it doesn't replace the file.

I will admit that you don't always get ub3r savings with jpegoptim. Sometimes you'll only save 10KB. It all depends on the program that produced the JPEG in the first place, some are just better than others.

I was able to find an un-optimized JPEG in my collection so I can show the output of the command. The --noaction switch causes it to not actually write the file)

```
cyberfoxx@Sally /mnt/hd/My Documents/Stuff/By Character, Series or Company/Ghost in the Shell $ time jpegoptim --noaction [AnimePaper]wallpapers_Ghost-in-the-Shell_drell_7786.jpg
[AnimePaper]wallpapers_Ghost-in-the-Shell_drell_7786.jpg 1600x1200 24bit Exif  [OK] 1055265 --> 1027187 bytes (2.66%), optimized.

real    0m0.276s
user    0m0.230s
sys     0m0.029s
```

Sure, a 28078 byte saving, but that saving starts to add up. As far as I'm concerned, every little bit counts.

Oh, and on an Adobe JPEG:

```
cyberfoxx@Sally /mnt/hd/My Documents/Stuff/By Character, Series or Company/Ghost in the Shell $ time jpegoptim --noaction r_motoko_02.jpg
r_motoko_02.jpg 1270x1750 24bit Adobe  [OK] 838883 --> 767441 bytes (8.52%), optimized.

real    0m0.319s
user    0m0.215s
sys     0m0.029s
```

71442 bytes saved, that's about the average that I've seen. Mind you, both of these images are quite vividly colored. Alot of the greyscale Manga scans I've been optimizing have been getting a 10-15% saving on the Adobe JPEGs and a ~6% saving on the Exif JPEGs. Still, it's all dependant on the program that generated the JPEG in the first place, some are just better at optimizing the Huffman tables than others. As I said in my other post, I had some JPEGs get almost a 600KB saving, but I got those JPEGs way back in the 90s and were almost 2MB in size before optimizing, so good chance if they were saved today, they'd be about the size there were optimized to.


EDIT: BTW, when I did those tests, I had the latest KDE 3.5.5 being emerged, so those test might've taken even less time if they had full CPU to use.


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## Sharra (Oct 12, 2006)

I myself use Adobe Illustrator for all my artwork, which means that my files are all vector. The benefit of vector is I could make any one of my pictures the size of a skyscraper with literally NO loss to the quality. Do I? No. Even my comic pages, which I put a pissload of effort into, I never upload bigger than 800 tall, and the file size itself is around 78kbps. 

Like I've seen a few people say already - why would you even want to upload higher res? You lose all the incentive for people to buy printed versions of your works. I guess the one thing VCL has beaten into me is that I just don't ever upload anything bigger than 800 pixels on its longest side. I'm not saying that THAT needs to be the rule, but if my images stay under 100kb, then 500+, even 350, is just ridiculous. The ONLY person on the web I'd even bother looking at images that high a resolution for is Enayla (Linda Bergkvist), and even SHE only uploads things at 700 high, with the occassional close up. And she's a world famous artist!


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## yak (Oct 12, 2006)

chicago-lollie said:
			
		

> ...So, er. How's that? ;;


techie ^^.

personally i vote for filesize limit and filesize limit alone. resolution can vary drastically when the filesize can remain the same. 350k is a fair amount. 

one old idea re-visited me while replying to this thread. have a 1MByte limit for "source" image uploads, but display "a thumbnail", if it can be named that way, for that image instead of the original file. Have the original available thrue that "download" link.  I didn't think about this thou.


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## Arshes Nei (Oct 12, 2006)

The only drawback I can see to keeping it small is if someone does tutorials on art. Usually these are the only things that usually have a larger file size. For regular artwork I think file size restrictions are fine, I just wonder if there is a way to treat tutorials in a good way since you'd either have to make a supersized tutorial so people can see details and your descriptions as well as screenshots or you break it up into small tutorials which can be annoying for a user to piece together.


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## lohfrum (Oct 12, 2006)

I don't like JPG's, so that automatically makes files a little bigger. I use PNG's, they have all the color info of a bmp but at about 1/5 the file size. Still I occasionaly have an image that's around 650kb, though I try to keep it to 300kb or less.
In my opinion, any file aproaching 1Mb is to freaken LARGE!!!Slim it down a bit people!


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## Evol (Oct 12, 2006)

No, I've just been traumatized by extremely fat fur pics where they're taking the Browns to the Super Bowl. 



			
				Calorath said:
			
		

> Awww *hugs*  I mean no disrespect to the pudgy people. I just hate corndogs.
> 
> 
> 
> ...


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## Kata'lina (Oct 12, 2006)

I use paintshop for all of my art. I just got photoshop and is slowly learning it.  Now I'm not attempting to make excuses here. It was simply ignorance on my part. [I'm quite new at doing digital art] 

It never crossed my mind how large my files might be. I did go through and checked some of them now after reading this thread. And while they Seem to be ok [under 200] I'm not fully sure.

And the Last thing I want to do, is abuse the genarosity of this site.  Even if it is unintentional. 

Now I'm still learning about the whole diffrence between jpeg, gif, and png.  So far it's been png i've been useing the most. the other images I plan on changing. 

The smaller I can get my image files to be, the happier I'll feel. And while I'm only one of many users here, I do know that every little bit helps. 

So yes, I feel 300 is the best cap off. To keep a site such as this one, I would think some people would be willing to do a bit of extra work. After all, in the end it's quite worth it.

Kata'lina.


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## Torin_Darkflight (Oct 12, 2006)

I also use PNG, and my artwork rarely exceeds 800x600, which is insanely small compared to a lot of the other art I've seen on here. Yet, in a lot of my more detailed images, the file sizes still push up around the 600-800KB range. JPG ruins the quality, I know this from experience. Even with the compression ratio turned down all the way, it causes artifacting, color changes and whatnot. And no, I'm not using some cheap image editor, I'm using Paint Shop Pro 9, a program that originally cost $150. PNG is the only option for me to retain the quality in images such as my 3D renders. I'm not saying my images are small, I realize they're perhaps bigger than they should be. But, PNG is my only realistic option. By putting a 500KB limit on images, you'd essentially be banning me and other artists like me from the site.

Now, if someone can show me a way to save art as JPG without a single pixel being changed whatsoever in the end image, then I might reconsider.


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## Gronthar (Oct 12, 2006)

You know... you could always keep the hi-res version on your hard drive and only show re-sized/re-compressed versions on the site using something like image magik t re-size&re-compress larger image files. That way if bandwidth becomes cheaper/you win the lotto or anything you could just refresh from the originals with a higher quality. And you would always be able to change the threshold without having people re-upload everything.

You could also use some algorithm to decide if an image is too large for it's resolution.

Oh course, this means writing a bot to look at all images sizes and re-sizing the larger ones, but it would end up with am immediate cutback in your bandwidth costs. Better than throttling the site as a whole.

So for now I guess you should have the server check the image size/resolution of a picture and compare it to the image size. If the image is uncompressed over a certain image size (say 300x200px) then it would delete the image from the server and tell the user to try again with a compressed image. Also, you might want to look into forbidding images larger than the 1600x1024 or whatever the largest desktop resolution is. No sense in hosting pictures that cannot be viewed on your monitor. (Of course, there are some artistic merits in large images like comics and images you aren't supposed to see all-at-once.... but it's a trade-off.)

But I'd say look into capping max resolution, and monitoring weather larger images are compressed or not instead of setting a maximum image size. And look into ways to automatically set current content to fit these rules while maintaining an unaltered original server-side version as a back up. People are lazy, so you might also want to make it auto-resize & recrop anyways upon upload unless people check off that they don't want it to be.


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## imnohbody (Oct 12, 2006)

Dragoneer said:
			
		

> So, we ask the question: _"Exactly when do you feel a filesize goes being 'fair' to 'holy shit, that's XBOX HUUUUUGE!'?"_



Sheesh, people are still making the Xbox size jokes? 

As for the voting so far, the cynic in me is wondering how much those 500K+ voters have actually contributed towards covering the FA's expenses.

(And on that note, I'll be looking into same once I get a job again. Unemployment licks goat gonads.  )


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## AnarchicQ (Oct 12, 2006)

Years ago, I was part of *Snirk*...Elfwood...and they had a 100kb imagesize limit. So they sort of beat "100+ bad!" into me. I try to keep everything down below 150-200kb, for three reasons.
Consideration for slower connections
Conserve harddrive space.
100+ bad! conditioning.


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## Dragoneer (Oct 12, 2006)

Arshes Nei said:
			
		

> The only drawback I can see to keeping it small is if someone does tutorials on art. Usually these are the only things that usually have a larger file size. For regular artwork I think file size restrictions are fine, I just wonder if there is a way to treat tutorials in a good way since you'd either have to make a supersized tutorial so people can see details and your descriptions as well as screenshots or you break it up into small tutorials which can be annoying for a user to piece together.


Well, I want to have a tutorials section of FA eventually where users can submit tutorials to us directly, we format them... post them up. That way they're not hidden in the submissions but freely available to all by one single click.


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## Dragoneer (Oct 12, 2006)

imnohbody said:
			
		

> Sheesh, people are still making the Xbox size jokes?


Well, the PS3 isn't out yet... so I can't officially make that particular pun yet.


----------



## LaserBeams (Oct 12, 2006)

Torin_Darkflight said:
			
		

> I also use PNG, and my artwork rarely exceeds 800x600, which is insanely small compared to a lot of the other art I've seen on here. Yet, in a lot of my more detailed images, the file sizes still push up around the 600-800KB range. JPG ruins the quality, I know this from experience. Even with the compression ratio turned down all the way, it causes artifacting, color changes and whatnot. And no, I'm not using some cheap image editor, I'm using Paint Shop Pro 9, a program that originally cost $150. PNG is the only option for me to retain the quality in images such as my 3D renders. I'm not saying my images are small, I realize they're perhaps bigger than they should be. But, PNG is my only realistic option. By putting a 500KB limit on images, you'd essentially be banning me and other artists like me from the site.
> 
> Now, if someone can show me a way to save art as JPG without a single pixel being changed whatsoever in the end image, then I might reconsider.



I'll use this image, just cause it looks moderately detailed:
http://www.furaffinity.net/view/137409/

- As you've saved it, it is 960,479 bytes.
- A Photoshop PSD of the same image is 1,351,085 bytes, slightly smaller than a BMP. The reason the PNG is so large is that the image is very noisy - there is grain to the image, and PNG doesn't compress well in that case.
- Converted to GIF, it is 288,745 bytes. It does not look *identical* but that's not the issue. There is a bit of dithering, but it's not something you notice unless you flip back and forth from one to the other, or you know where to look. It doesn't detract from the content of the image, or destroy how it looks. Doing a layer difference between the GIF and the original shows the errors, which are fairly visible, as would be expected, but the eye can't see that.
- Converted to JPG (quality 8 in PS, optimized), it is 316,283 bytes. Doing a difference between this and the originial, the error is less than 1/4 that of the GIF, and when flipping back and forth, I can see no difference at all, even in 'tricky' areas. The image doesn't look blurred or color-mangled in any way. (Note: I used PS's JPG compression. I don't know what PSP's is like, but if it's anything like Irfanview's, I can't blame you for not using it. Even at 90%, irfanview provides some quite artifacty, noisy images (208kb). As others have mentioned, the GIMP might be good, and I'm sure there are other options out there.)



			
				Torin_Darkflight said:
			
		

> Now, if someone can show me a way to save art as JPG without a single pixel being changed whatsoever in the end image, then I might reconsider.



This is an unrealistic expectation, especially when people are just viewing your artwork. I can guarantee that NOBODY will notice if the pixels that are 156,167,132 on your end are 152,169,137 on their end.Â Â It just doesn't matter, and across an entire image, it evens out very nicely. That's what JPG was designed for. 100% accurate color reproduction on the web is a myth - everyone's got a different monitor and gamma settings, so no matter what you do, it won't look exactly like yours.

There *is* such a thing as 'good enough'. I would provide comparison images and difference graphs, but you can perform the test for yourself.

Edit: I just tested PSP9's JPG compression. At a setting of 10 (1=highest quality, about 780kb, 99=lowest), the image came out about 260kb, and similar to PS in size and quality, though with a tiny bit more blur, and noise in the difference graph. None of that however was visible on flipping, without zooming in. I maintain my stance that 'good enough' is what we need to strive for, rather than perfection. When you upload 1mb images in an attempt to make sure that your viewers get exactly what you see, you're not really making a difference to them (aside using more of their bandwidth - I feel sorry for australian users), and you're just costing FA more in terms of space and bandwidth, which hurts everyone.  Gotta make a tradeoff somewhere.


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## CyberFoxx (Oct 12, 2006)

Torin_Darkflight said:
			
		

> Now, if someone can show me a way to save art as JPG without a single pixel being changed whatsoever in the end image, then I might reconsider.



This, due to the lossy nature of JPEG, is impossible. It's the same as asking for the output of a MP3 to be bit-identical to the original Wave, it'll never happen. Once you toss those bits away, they're gone forever. Sure, you can make guesses, but it'll never be perfect.


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## Dragoneer (Oct 12, 2006)

CyberFoxx said:
			
		

> This, due to the lossy nature of JPEG, is impossible. It's the same as asking for the output of a MP3 to be bit-identical to the original Wave, it'll never happen. Once you toss those bits away, they're gone forever. Sure, you can make guesses, but it'll never be perfect.


Yep. It comes down to a bit of tweaking to find the most quality for the least amount of filesize. The Internet is still not uber-enough to provide complete lossless distrobution, some compression damage is to be expected.

Hell, look at any DVD... you can spot JPG-style compression damage in there. But, it is possible to reduce the amount so that the naked eye can't see it without having to zoom in and hunt for it.

Viewing the image at 100% of its size... eh, usually you can't even spot the difference.


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## Vanst (Oct 12, 2006)

I'm astounded that so many people think that 500k per image is "too large". That's half a meg every time that image is viewed, and some images get several hundred or thousand views. For popular images, that could easily equate to *gigs* of transfer.

While I'm no artist (lol writer lol), I can't see any reason for any 72DPI image that isn't XBOX-by-XBOX in size to ever crack 200k. Come up with whatever excuses you like to make yourself feel better about it, but you won't change my mind on this.


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## Dragoneer (Oct 12, 2006)

Vanst said:
			
		

> I'm astounded that so many people think that 500k per image is "too large". That's half a meg every time that image is viewed, and some images get several hundred or thousand views. For popular images, that could easily equate to *gigs* of transfer.
> 
> While I'm no artist (lol writer lol), I can't see any reason for any 72DPI image that isn't XBOX-by-XBOX in size to ever crack 200k. Come up with whatever excuses you like to make yourself feel better about it, but you won't change my mind on this.


We found an image posted last night that was almost 1MB. For a picture. Every single view that picture gets slams us... *shudder*


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## Torin_Darkflight (Oct 12, 2006)

Well, I'm still gonna keep using PNG with the original versions of my art (I'll never stop hating JPG in my artwork). But, I suppose I can compromise by uploading only JPG or GIF to FA, then in the image descriptions, post a link to the PNG original on my art gallery website. At least then viewers of my gallery would still be able to see the better quality original versions.

This raises another question...if file size limits are applied, would they be enforced for all images, including ones that have been uploaded already, or would they only apply to new images uploaded after the rule is enacted? The reason I ask is because I have a LOT of images in my art gallery, and even on high-speed internet, it would take me a long time to re-upload JPG versions of them...not to mention the thumbnails that goes along with them because of that annoying thumbnails-disappearing-whenever-you-edit-submissions bug.

My opinion is that it would make sense to only apply it to art uploaded after the rule is enacted. There are two core reasons that make me say this:

-It'll help avoid people having to re-upload artwork, as mentioned earlier. This would come in handy for those who have hundreds of images in their galleries.

-My observations have been that a vast majority (Perhaps 80% or more) of the views on a single image come within the first two or three days of the image being posted, after which the number of views rapidly drops off. Thus, any old artwork that is already on the site has likely already been seen by a majority of those who wish to see it, and no longer pose a significant "bandwidth consumption" risk.

Just my opinions on it.


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## Umbreona (Oct 12, 2006)

This is what I have to say: It is rough having to deal with heavy bandwidth usage no doubt and I would not want you breaking your bank over larger images or the like that could be placed on other sites like Tripod for free and linked to this one but bigger is always better.

The other thing I would say here is that I bet you're greatful my artistic skill is horrid and I only write stories! LOL They have a hard time getting over 50K when they're .rtf files!


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## complication5 (Oct 12, 2006)

I believe the flash files and music files may use up the most bandwidth. I can't see how images could go so large. I keep the size of the images I upload less than 100KB. It is probably a reflex action from living in 56kb days. Perhaps limiting the amount of music/flash a person can upload in a month's time would be appropriate?


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## Hanazawa (Oct 12, 2006)

complication5 said:
			
		

> I believe the flash files and music files may use up the most bandwidth. I can't see how images could go so large. I keep the size of the images I upload less than 100KB. It is probably a reflex action from living in 56kb days. Perhaps limiting the amount of music/flash a person can upload in a month's time would be appropriate?



I've seen some really honkin' huge image files. Batch-uploaded. All at once.

I'm not suggesting that music files aren't large, by any means; I'm just saying that large images are definitely more *frequent* than music submissions... and I'm inclined to think that the popularity of some artists causes their bandwidth usage to go much, much faster than 95% of the music bin.

If the admins are capable of giving any comparison on bandwidth usage between the sections, I'd definitely be interested in seeing that 

Though I admit I've considered saving many of my songs in mono rather than stereo. Saves a ton of space and if I'm not using special stereo effects there's not any noticable difference IMHO... but I'm deaf in one side so I'm probably not the best person to decide that


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## Voln (Oct 12, 2006)

emptyF said:
			
		

> i never even thought about my file sizes until you mentioned it.Â Â turns out most of mine are under 100k . . . 150 was the max.Â Â go figure.Â Â it's probably because i suck.Â Â oh well, at least i'm not a bandwidth hog.




That doesn't mean you suck, it just means you're economic!Â Â I think most of mine are pretty small, too.


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## Firehazard (Oct 12, 2006)

My opinion is that we already have the option of viewing only smaller versions of the picture.  So people with slow connections can look at the smaller version and opt out of full-viewing it if they want to.  Sometimes a largeish image is necessary, for instance long comics or tutorials (especially the latter).

That said, most normal images don't really need to be any wider than a typical 1024Ã—768 screen can show, and not too much taller than that.  If your image is that size, chances are it's not going to _be_ a huge file unless you _really_ suck at compression know-how or are ridiculously picky about image quality.  When exceptions have to be made, such as for tutorials, the option of posting an image that big ought to be an option that's kept open.

Also, Umbreona makes a good point: dial-up is not ideal for anyone, anywhere, on any site.  Those who are stuck using it have gotten used to lag by now.  Speaking from experience, NO website nowadays loads quickly enough over 56k once you've gotten used to broadband.

As far as server space and bandwidth... filesize limitations aren't going to make much difference on a site that grows as fast as this one does.  Any money you save limiting filesize will be lost within a couple months anyway.  The only effective way to reduce costs is to allow ads.  If you can find a deal that makes the site break even, you're fully scaleable: the bigger the site gets, the more money you make from ad hits.  And trust me, I'm not big on ads.  Heck, if there were any other workable way I'd recommend it.  But if you're having trouble meeting expenses _now_, any temporary fixes won't help prolong the site's survival past a few months.

Just don't, for the love of Dog, ever go with a provider that allows SHOOT THE TURKEY AND WIN A FREE GAMEPLAY360!!!!!!111 type ads.  *shudder*


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## Arshes Nei (Oct 12, 2006)

Dragoneer said:
			
		

> Arshes Nei said:
> 
> 
> 
> ...



That would be an interesting idea, do you have any people that would head such the project so that they get formatted correctly and such?


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## Starblind (Oct 12, 2006)

One suggestion is to try to get people to strip the headers and stuff out of their images, using a program like Jstrip.  I do that with every single thing I post online, from a tiny avatar to a blog picture to a high-quality artwork scan.  It always sayves at least 3K even on tiny images, sometimes up to 6K.  Apparently Photoshop adds lots of headers to images. Stripping these out has absolutely NO EFFECT ON QUALITY, so you're not sacrificing anything either.

Granted, 3 to 6 KB isn't a whole lot, but if the image is being downloaded thousands of times, it can add up to significant savings in the long run.


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## Kougar (Oct 12, 2006)

My apologies if it has already been mentioned... but in line with Suke's idea, what about having some sort of powerful app like Photoshop automatically compress file sizes for all uploads to FA? I do not mean scaling the image size down, but simply having a powerful app like Photoshop run a high-compression run on each file submitted for upload. I am still amazed at how much compression it can give to 3mb print quality jpgs without any loss in quality or reduction in size. Even already compressed images it's able to compress down further. 

Assuming this wouldn't offend some artists, and if it did, then perhaps enabling the compression by default but give the user the option to disable it for that upload and use their own compression software... Just some random thoughts. Finding an application that's as powerful as Photoshop's jpeg compression abilities that can be legally ported for FA use might also be a major problem.


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## Hanazawa (Oct 12, 2006)

Firehazard said:
			
		

> My opinion is that we already have the option of viewing only smaller versions of the picture.



Well, yes and no - I ignore preview images and go straight to fullsize because I can already tell from the small thumbnail if I want to see the big picture - the problem is the thumbnail doesn't tell me what the big picture's actual dimensions and/or filesize are. Most of the time, clicking from the thumbnail is fine... but every now and then I get those huge freaking images loading up on me. And I'm talking about sizes that aren't necessary, ever. :/


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## uncia2000 (Oct 12, 2006)

More than one question wrapped up in this, I think...
(Would be good to resurrect the old thread from over on the ArtPlz forums, since I'm sure that's where the number crunching was done).

Anyhow...
As to "personal" thoughts on what size is "too big", right towards the top end of the options presented.
Larger files /can/ be justified in terms of visual appearance, but as the exception rather than the rule... which is, of course, the crunch.

View counts are important, too, and _perhaps_ a larger percentage of the more popular artists are better at achieving a good size/quality compression balance. I'm not naming the obvious exceptions I've seen!
Given that, and the current distribution of image file sizes (and there are many well compressed images), in order to create a significant throughput benefit I'd suspect a hard limit would have to be right down to around 200k max.

(aside: IMO, the example pic of Kacey's detailed 1280*569 = "only" 236k looks rather lossy to me; it's mostly the lack of any larger monochromatic areas that "hides" that lossiness at first view. A good "test piece", though.
And the idea of keeping larger versions of images on one's own website only works for the small minority of users who actually have one of those).

The other "obvious" bandwidth hog (despite lack of actual stats on traffic throughput) are animated avvies in the 50-100-200k range, especially for popular users. Even with user-side caching, the vast majority of those will require to be sent by FA many more times than all but the most popular of image submissions.
There was a half-hearted effort previously to reduce the avvie max to 30k/50k, but that came to nothing in the end.

Just my 02c, anyhow. 



			
				Hanazawa said:
			
		

> Well, yes and no - I ignore preview images and go straight to fullsize because I can already tell from the small thumbnail if I want to see the big picture - the problem is the thumbnail doesn't tell me what the big picture's actual dimensions and/or filesize are.



That's been a long-time request to have those display on the mouseover box.

Around half of the /active/ FA users go direct to the fullsize image, without viewing the intermediate version. It could be argued that that either increases or decreases the stress on the system, depending on other viewing behavior factors.


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## Shiuk (Oct 12, 2006)

There is seriously no reason for file sizes on web images to be anything over 200 KB. With a good know-how on JPeg compression and keeping the pixel size of the picture on a viewing scale of course. Each picture in my own gallery rarely exceeds 150 KBs. I'm ashamed that people believe that 500KB+ should be the limit, cause that's seriously astonishing. The only reason for such huge file sizes to reach half a meg would be in the case of printing, not for web show.


----------



## Kougar (Oct 12, 2006)

That is a very good point about avvies... especially considering that not every does use browser caches, and a good majority set them to be extremely small by IE's usual standards. (20mb is Opera's default disk cache) I'd hope that in some cases when the same avatar is displayed 6+ times on a single page that it only needs to DL just once? (Just to double-check that)

*pounces the floofy title kitty* 

Edit: Shiuk, if a user wanted to upload a wallpaper it would need to be over 200kB, closer to 500kB. I'd have voted for 500kb+ in the poll if bandwidth wasn't an issue like it is, as really on some uploaded images you just can't see the detail at posted resolutions.


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## Shiuk (Oct 12, 2006)

Arshes Nei said:
			
		

> Dragoneer said:
> 
> 
> 
> ...




I actually was working on a flash tutorial explaining how to properly compress and resize a picture for Y! gallery some time ago, don't know if you be interested in that if I can find it.


----------



## Arshes Nei (Oct 12, 2006)

Shiuk said:
			
		

> I actually was working on a flash tutorial explaining how to properly compress and resize a picture for Y! gallery some time ago, don't know if you be interested in that if I can find it.



Well I have no problem with FA wanting users to resize regular images. I'm specifically referring to tutorials that go into how to CG or do lineart where you can go into extensive detail and you want to have large closeups of a process, or add in screenshots, etc..


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## vashdragon (Oct 12, 2006)

My two cents i guess.  I probly wont pay attention to this forum after making this post though.

Anyways, i dont much like the idea of having a limit on what can be uploaded.  If someone wants to upload something at a large size they should probly be permitted.  However, it is quite annoying when you get stuck looking at an unfinished work that like 5 times larger than my moniter and a meg in size.

I think there probly should be a limit just to make sure that pictures like these dont find their way on to the site.  Proper compression for web viewing is extremely important for websites, and something all artists should learn.  Seeing as that compression and resizing programs are very common and a lot work very well, there really is no excuse why not.

In the end though, i really dont think the limit should be set to lower than 500kb.  (At the same time i really dont expect an artist to upload an image more than 300kb.)  But larger than 500kb just seems like a mistake and a waste of bandwidth, as a picture with that much detail or that large a size will be more of a pain to view on my computer than beneficial.  Anyways, i still dont think the limit should be set lower than 500kb because you never know, there may be a situation where the artist really wants to upload that large image for some perticular reason.  But a limit on oversized artwork is very much usefull.


----------



## CyberFoxx (Oct 12, 2006)

Well, I decided to do a little experiment, to see what the allocation of the different filesizes are in my 12GB collection. I wrote a little shellscript to help me. For those also running *NIX, here's the code:


```
#!/bin/bash
echo "Finding files 0bytes to 99Kbytes"
find . ( -size +0b -and -size -99k ) -and ( -iname '*.jpg' -or -iname '*.png' -or -iname '*.gif' ) > 99k.txt
echo "Finding files 100Kbytes to 199Kbytes"
find . ( -size +100k -and -size -199k ) -and ( -iname '*.jpg' -or -iname '*.png' -or -iname '*.gif' ) > 199k.txt
echo "Finding files 200Kbytes to 299Kbytes"
find . ( -size +200k -and -size -299k ) -and ( -iname '*.jpg' -or -iname '*.png' -or -iname '*.gif' ) > 299k.txt
echo "Finding files 300Kbytes to 399Kbytes"
find . ( -size +300k -and -size -399k ) -and ( -iname '*.jpg' -or -iname '*.png' -or -iname '*.gif' ) > 399k.txt
echo "Finding files 400Kbytes to 499Kbytes"
find . ( -size +400k -and -size -499k ) -and ( -iname '*.jpg' -or -iname '*.png' -or -iname '*.gif' ) > 499k.txt
echo "Finding files 500Kbytes to 599Kbytes"
find . ( -size +500k -and -size -599k ) -and ( -iname '*.jpg' -or -iname '*.png' -or -iname '*.gif' ) > 599k.txt
echo "Finding files 600Kbytes to 699Kbytes"
find . ( -size +600k -and -size -699k ) -and ( -iname '*.jpg' -or -iname '*.png' -or -iname '*.gif' ) > 699k.txt
echo "Finding files 700Kbytes to 799Kbytes"
find . ( -size +700k -and -size -799k ) -and ( -iname '*.jpg' -or -iname '*.png' -or -iname '*.gif' ) > 799k.txt
echo "Finding files 800Kbytes to 899Kbytes"
find . ( -size +800k -and -size -899k ) -and ( -iname '*.jpg' -or -iname '*.png' -or -iname '*.gif' ) > 899k.txt
echo "Finding files 900Kbytes to 999Kbytes"
find . ( -size +900k -and -size -999k ) -and ( -iname '*.jpg' -or -iname '*.png' -or -iname '*.gif' ) > 999k.txt
echo "Finding files 1Mbyte and larger"
find . -size +1M -and ( -iname '*.jpg' -or -iname '*.png' -or -iname '*.gif' ) > 1m.txt
```

It's just a simple script that uses the amazing find util (Which should be part of any *NIX distribution) and just outputs the filenames to a textfile. Ya just gotta run it in the parent of the directory tree that you want to check. (For me it was /mnt/hd/My Documents/Stuff/) It's not 100% accurate. (I should've used 1byte to 101376bytes for the first test, and use bytes instead of Kbytes and Mbytes after that. Oh well, not a shellscripting guru here.) Afterwards, I just used less to view the file, and get a line count. Here's the results:


0bytes to 99Kbytes: 39367 files
100Kbytes to 199Kbytes: 18925 files
200Kbytes to 299Kbytes: 9103 files
300Kbytes to 399Kbytes: 4103 files
400Kbytes to 499Kbytes: 1568 files
500Kbytes to 599Kbytes: 1287 files
600Kbytes to 699Kbytes: 890 files
700Kbytes to 799Kbytes: 297 files
800Kbytes to 899Kbytes: 175 files
900Kbytes to 999Kbytes: 126 files
1Mbytes and larger: 408 files

Now, I admit that I have been going through and jpegoptim'ng and optipng'ng alot of my collection But even then, it seems that at least in my collection, anything over 300Kbytes is rare. The main area seems to be clustered in the 0bytes to 199Kbytes range, with a bit spilling into the 299Kbytes and 399Kbytes range.

I might re-write the script to fix some bugs (0bytes, Bytes over Kbytes) and maybe even sorting via image type, JPEG, GIF or PNG. But eh, I just did this out of curiosity. Still, it is quite eye opening.


----------



## uncia2000 (Oct 12, 2006)

CyberFoxx said:
			
		

> Well, I decided to do a little experiment...



*g*. Yeah, that kind of number crunching. Thanks, CyberFoxx. 

Pretty much tallies with my "would have to be right down to around 200k max. hard limit to have any _significant_ throughput benefit" (paraphr.) comment.


----------



## shep (Oct 12, 2006)

Although I see a lot of good art on FA that is worthy of uploading in its full glory, I also see much more half-assed drawings that people throw on a scanner then upload full size.  I think the best thing to do would be limit how much a person could upload per month or week.  A great picture takes time anyway, so if you think its worth uploading it over 500k out of your allotted limit, then go for it.  If you just did a dozen poorly rendered pictures of stick figure porn while waiting around at jury duty and want to upload them all without resizing, then you're going to run out of upload allotment.
Educating people on how to manage their image sizes would be good too.


----------



## dom2012 (Oct 12, 2006)

I'm not an artist. I'm a writer, but I would have to say that in my opinion it would be great to limit art to around 200kb. I like looking at the drawings--it gives inspiration, but if i wanted to see highly, and by highly i mean you can see that off-coloration of a mole down to the pore, detailed art, id just end up going to the artists website. For FA I just wanted to see the drawings, not the detail. If I wanted detail, like I said, I'd go to the artists website and commission them if i had the money.

Speaking of money, id really like to not have to pay to visit FA.


----------



## Honeymane (Oct 13, 2006)

Personally, I think FA shouldn't put a set limit on file sizes, Unless FA is perhaps willing to allow larger images to be uploaded, but only so many per month, or, they have to be in ziped file (etc)


----------



## Shiuk (Oct 13, 2006)

Kougar said:
			
		

> That is a very good point about avvies... especially considering that not every does use browser caches, and a good majority set them to be extremely small by IE's usual standards. (20mb is Opera's default disk cache) I'd hope that in some cases when the same avatar is displayed 6+ times on a single page that it only needs to DL just once? (Just to double-check that)
> 
> *pounces the floofy title kitty*
> 
> Edit: Shiuk, if a user wanted to upload a wallpaper it would need to be over 200kB, closer to 500kB. I'd have voted for 500kb+ in the poll if bandwidth wasn't an issue like it is, as really on some uploaded images you just can't see the detail at posted resolutions.



A, browser chaches, it be wonderful if everyone had them set to 500mbs like normal people should. The problem with web images is that you are not suppoused to look at the detail, that's what printed images are for. Web images are mostly for, a quick glance at the person's stuff, if they want a detail shot that's another story. Now, I normally wouldn't care about detail shots, but many of the people that upload huge images don't have that much detail on their drawings.

And babe :3 please, I have wallpapers under 100Kbs in JPeg, and they look just as viewtiful as 1-3 meg BitMaps.


----------



## Dickie (Oct 13, 2006)

It's been said before, but when you have to compress your images, the quality quite frankly sucks.

My monster of a monitor is 1400x1050, and I STILL get pictures in my inbox that are way too freaking huge to fit on my page. Perhaps having a dimensions limit on the pictures will actually help the bandwidth issues, because just shrinking the images to a decent size will cut the size of the image dramatically.



			
				Swampwulf said:
			
		

> Nor I assume, text files.
> I can't imagine writing a piece that took up 500+k of space.
> Maybe if I was Stephen King...



That's actually about average for my completed pieces, but I'm just a nut. XD


----------



## Thaily (Oct 13, 2006)

Calorath said:
			
		

> I don't care. Furaffinity is not Photobucket. I want to see FURRY art. Not some fat shit eating a corndog.



qft


----------



## dave hyena (Oct 13, 2006)

I just looked through (in details view), my collection of the furry art I have saved over the past few years, and of 455 files, only two are larger than 249 kb (and they are huge very detailed images intended for printing anyway). 

And if any of these images are compressed or whatnot, it's not really noticable. (And I'm not going to be printing out any of them or anything anyway.)


----------



## JessicaElwood (Oct 13, 2006)

Personally, I would suggest a 300k limit. I know there are people out there that donâ€™t know how to compress pictures and just upload them as large as they come from their scanner, and some dread the artifacts lower compression levels can cause. But, all of the JPG horror can be avoided with some smart compression (I use ACDSee 5.0 for compression and it does work wonders). Quoting another user, I like to use rich colors and details, many times these JPG artifacts seem to love as spawning grounds (high saturated red and blue, mainly) but that doesnâ€™t mean I need images with obscene file sizes. Here are two examples of what can de done with a 80% compression + progressive and optimize options.

Image 1

Image 2

They have about no differences with the original PSD files =) as for the compression bots, the one used by VCL works wonders most of time, so maybe coding one into the upload system could be a good idea?


----------



## Shiuk (Oct 13, 2006)

Dickie said:
			
		

> It's been said before, but when you have to compress your images, the quality quite frankly sucks.
> 
> My monster of a monitor is 1400x1050, and I STILL get pictures in my inbox that are way too freaking huge to fit on my page. Perhaps having a dimensions limit on the pictures will actually help the bandwidth issues, because just shrinking the images to a decent size will cut the size of the image dramatically.



The problem with compressing images is that there are many ways of doing it, there are many levels of compression, and there are too many programs that claim to do it correctly and well. With the right now-how, you can compress drawings down to under 200KBs and keep them crisp and clean while keeping them in the 1000 pixel range. Truth be told it is a good idea to put up dimension limits on drawing but that won't stop people from putting up 500KB+ images under 800X600 (and believe me, those do exist).


----------



## furry (Oct 13, 2006)

Uncia mentioned something about Avatars..?
Didn't they use to be limited to 30kb? What happened?


----------



## uncia2000 (Oct 13, 2006)

furry said:
			
		

> Uncia mentioned something about Avatars..?
> Didn't they use to be limited to 30kb? What happened?



In "recent history" (early 2006), there wasn't a limit, and some community members were using one meg + avvies.
We were informally asking people to cut back on those and a hard limit was later imposed at 200k max; somewhat confused by an "understanding" that a target in the 30-50k band was going to be on the cards, yet this was never implemented.

Although animated avvies aren't quite as common as they were, it's still very easy to build up a considerable weight in well-used avvies.
1.15 megs below, for a start:






































[ed.] temp removed avvies for any passers-by on dialup... :?

It's almost impossible to browse FA without picking up many/most of those (just a quick sample of the obvious without any finger pointing, of course, since there's no rule-breaking here).

On any given day, I'm fairly sure that these are all re-loaded by more users than all bar the most popular of image submissions (if even those).

d.

=
p.s. I do hope y'all were cached...


----------



## dave hyena (Oct 14, 2006)

I think a 30kb avatar limit should be implemented (alongside a 250 to 300kb image size limit) since that is certainly easier than adding some method whereby one can browse FA with avatars turned off.

I reckon it would be a fine thing if a bandwidth minimal version of FA were to be made, whereby one may browse with the minimum amount of graphics, in order that less expenses may be incurred on the sites funders.

If such a thing will not be done anytime soon, bringing in image/avatar size limits is a reasonable measure in the meantime to bring down bandwidth I think.

Also, relevant to the comments made earlier in this thread about browser caches, I looked at mine (opera) and found it was set to no Mb and the memory cache too, so I have set it to 400 mb and also the memory cache to 4 mb.


----------



## Dragoneer (Oct 14, 2006)

Dave Hyena said:
			
		

> I think a 30kb avatar limit should be implemented (alongside a 250 to 300kb image size limit) since that is certainly easier than adding some method whereby one can browse FA with avatars turned off.


Right now, I think 300K is a good cap for file sizes and a 30K limit for AVs. That seems to be a fair number, though we're not concrete on that number as of yet.


----------



## uncia2000 (Oct 14, 2006)

Dragoneer said:
			
		

> Right now, I think 300K is a good cap for file sizes and a 30K limit for AVs. That seems to be a fair number, though we're not concrete on that number as of yet.



Having done the number crunching, a hard 300k limit on image submissions still saves us _very_ little bandwidth... :?
Simply compiling a list of artists with larger file submissions and dropping them notes re. compression could probably save more. Not as though that couldn't be done on a semi-automated basis, either; possibly combined with the need to click through to another "are you sure?" screen if over-sized submission files are detected on upload (and reduce /that/ soft limit figure downwards, as required).

Even taking the limit down to 200k (at which point, there's a more significant saving on the "average" image), any "benefit" can easily be swamped out by a screed of user comments - even with small filesize avvies. Plus the fact that much of the traffic load occurs elsewhere on FA, /not/ just looking at image submissions.
Being able to turn off the avvies totally (either under user control, or globally at "times of need") would be an interesting experiment. 

Reducing the avvie limit is a relatively easy "win", IMO, and doesn't impact artist integrity, real or imagined, anything like as much as an image size reduction to 200k or below.
Not a be-all and end-all in its own right, of course, since we're still talking relatively small percentage reductions against the overall FA traffic growth.

02c only, as ever.


----------



## Dragoneer (Oct 14, 2006)

uncia2000 said:
			
		

> Having done the number crunching, a hard 300k limit on image submissions still saves us _very_ little bandwidth... :?
> Simply compiling a list of artists with larger file submissions and dropping them notes re. compression could probably save more. Not as though that couldn't be done on a semi-automated basis, either; possibly combined with the need to click through to another "are you sure?" screen if over-sized submission files are detected on upload (and reduce /that/ soft limit figure downwards, as required).


Well, it's a case of every little bit helps. The larger FA grows, the larger that  "little bit" grows, and grows exponentially. Even if we save a mere 2%, that's 2% of roughly 2TB of month data transfer a month. 20 GB is nothing to joke about. The more % we can pull off, the better we are long term

Naturally, we can make revisions all over the board... but we need to start looking where we can make improves most effectively. We need to cut zee costs!


----------



## dave hyena (Oct 14, 2006)

Looking at the user "ZEN" as an example of a high traffic account:

They have over 2200 watchers, more than 18500 views ,their most recently uploaded picture (october 13th) has 74 comments and been up for a day & has 1172 views.

I went through all the comments and noted the avatar size on each one in a spreadsheet. I only listed the avatar size once, since I assume in the case of multiple comments by the same person, it only loads it once.

The total size of the avatars was 651.4KB

ZEN's second to most recent picture has received over 2100 views (and been up for just 3 days). So if we assume another 1000 views to come in the next few days on the most recent image, that's over *636MB of bandwidth from the avatars on one image!*

Looking at the "is watching" and "watched by" tabs on ZENs account, the total amount of bandwidth used by avatars on those tabs is 789kb. (one of the avatars is 200KB and two others 134KB & 110KB!)

If just a thousand people looked at the page since those tabs were introduced, thats 770MB of bandwidth from page views alone.

So over the months, we could be talking tens of gigabytes, just to display avatars on this one account, and there are quie a few other artists just as popular.

If the "Is watching" & "watched by tabs" were switched to text only (like on DA) it would save hundreds of gigabytes of bandwidth over all of FA.

If a limit on the number of comments you saw when you looked at an image was implemented, say 20, that would reduce the avatar bandwidth required on ZENs most recently uploaded picture to 149.5kb. If you had another 1000 views, that reduces the amount of bandwidth used to just 18MB, a saving of more than 600MB.

Drastically reducing the situations where avatars are displayed, avatarless browseing, reducing the avatars size etc could be a real way of saving a hell of a lot of bandwidth.

I reckon that avatars may be using up more overall bandwidth on FA than the art!


----------



## Evol (Oct 14, 2006)

Dragoneer said:
			
		

> Right now, I think 300K is a good cap for file sizes and a 30K limit for AVs. That seems to be a fair number, though we're not concrete on that number as of yet.



I tend to use a lot of my LJ icons as avatars, which have a maximum size of 40K.  I know a lot of other users who do too.  I think this should be a fairer limit.


----------



## uncia2000 (Oct 14, 2006)

Evol said:
			
		

> I tend to use a lot of my LJ icons as avatars, which have a maximum size of 40K.  I know a lot of other users who do too.  I think this should be a fairer limit.



The LJ limit was one on the original suggestions, long-time back, but I personally suspect that's more "convenience", rather than "fairer".
The manner in which avvies are used (and contribute to the traffic) on FA is totally different to LJ.

30k doesn't trash creativity by any means - and, to be honest, I was going to play devil's advocate and suggest 25k or even 20k  (grandfathering in any avvies up to 50k?)

Anyhow, anything in that range is not going to be the end of animated avvies on FA...

e.g.
2.4k - 14.1k, increasing (average 8.6k)


















































15.6k - 21.0k (average 17.7k)


























23.8k - 29.0k (average 26.5k)
































=
p.s. Many thanks to the well-known community member who just uploaded a brand-new avvie exactly on the 200k limit.
I don't suppose they read this thread... :roll:


----------



## uncia2000 (Oct 14, 2006)

Dave Hyena said:
			
		

> Looking at the user "ZEN" as an example of a high traffic account...
> 
> <clip lotsa good stuff>
> 
> I reckon that avatars may be using up more overall bandwidth on FA than the art!



Yep, everything Dave says. Except I'm fairly sure that the avvies eat up more of the total traffic than the artwork does, at present.

The difference between ourselves and LJ is that all that's needed is an otherwise low-profile user to stick a "wow!" comment in at the top of a Zen submission and we clock up 65 megs of uploads in avvies alone, even presuming "only" a 30k avvie (since that user's will not have been cached previously by 95-99% of the community). And that's bytes, not bits, of course...


----------



## insanityJ (Oct 14, 2006)

500k+ i like mine as big as possible


----------



## uncia2000 (Oct 14, 2006)

Dragoneer said:
			
		

> Well, it's a case of every little bit helps. The larger FA grows, the larger that  "little bit" grows, and grows exponentially. Even if we save a mere 2%, that's 2% of roughly 2TB of month data transfer a month. 20 GB is nothing to joke about. The more % we can pull off, the better we are long term
> 
> Naturally, we can make revisions all over the board... but we need to start looking where we can make improves most effectively. We need to cut zee costs!



Cut, stabilise and/or cover. Yup, no debating that. 

Difficult to guess the precise ratio of traffic arising from actual image submissions, but a 2% total reduction from a 300k hard limit would be about the max - and I have a sneaking suspicion the actual figure might be less. Say $10/month, anyhow.
If that figure's "accurate", would be closer 4% with a 200k hard limit.

Trouble being, I don't really think that's _really_ good "value for money", given the hassle to the community such a hard limit cause.

Personally, I'd go more towards 500-600k hard (still a $3-4/month "notional" saving, on those figures, whilst totally blocking ~80% less user submissions) with 150-200k soft (nag screens if attempting to upload greater than that, plus notes/tutorial pointers for those members who currently have an average somewhat in excess of that, offering compression facilities for existing works (aids more with regards to disk space, tbh), etc.).
Encouraging compression rather than forcing people to play to a half-way-house hard limit would probably have a greater net benefit, whereas any time a hard limit is reduced that will create a disproportionate amount of grief.

Combine that with work on avvies (size and option to turn off, by user or globally), number of displayed comments (submissions, journals and shouts), any remaining hotlinking, etc...
Most of these aren't _that_ difficult to implement.


----------



## uncia2000 (Oct 14, 2006)

insanityJ said:
			
		

> 500k+ i like mine as big as possible



Those you had uploaded last month (e.g. http://www.furaffinity.net/view/232007/ ) were 100 - 250k, whereas the "similar" images you've uploaded in the past few hours are 750k - 1meg. What exactly are you trying to demonstrate? 

_*shakes head*_


----------



## Magica (Oct 14, 2006)

I think I've submitted a few around the 400-500k line, but that's because I like the have the highest quality of my scan possible.  Photoshop does the higher sized files, while I think Arcsoft PhotoStudio does smaller.  I'll have to experiment to find high-quality versus small size.


----------



## dave hyena (Oct 15, 2006)

uncia2000 said:
			
		

> Trouble being, I don't really think that's _really_ good "value for money", given the hassle to the community such a hard limit cause.
> 
> ...
> 
> ...



That all makes perfect sense. It's the art people come here for, and it's avatars which are eating up all the bandwidth. FA must wield it's FISTS OF FUR{R}Y against avatars.

Is it really needed to have avatars displayed when you mouse over a thumbnail on "browse" mode?

I don't think so, because you're seeing a thumbnail of their art right there. So there is no need for an avatar in order to raise your interest or give a sample of their art.

Even if it just loads them when you mouse over a picture, I still dread to think how much bandwidth it's using up.

here I have made a mock up of how a more bandwidth optimised FA might look:


----------



## RailRide (Oct 15, 2006)

Having read the entire thread up to now, why do I get the feeling that if FA were to in some way go down or otherwise irrevocably lose its image submissions, those who support uploading ginormous images would be crying that FA had the _only_ extant copies of these works?

Geez, I have pristine 2 meg and 24 meg versions of most of the stuff I post (and I don't even consider myself anywhere near *uber-elite artiste'*) , but those stay on external hard drives at home/work. The crushed-down stuff with compression artifacts is what I post online, and if I or anyone else absolutely must see "maximum quality" versions, I still have those for use without driving up someone else's hosting bill.

I still say (now knowing that it's another long-time request) to put image dimensions and filesize in the thumbnail mousovers--even having DSL I'd have second thoughts on clicking on a 500K+ image, just on principle. Some of these folks sound like the Slashdotters whining that everyone should have gigabit broadband with the right to saturate it 24/7 for--$10 a month (I wish I were exaggerating)

Perhaps another suggestion is a limit on the amount of data uploaded within a certain time period. That way those who feel compelled to put up print-quality images (that they'll never get to sell actual prints of 'cause everybody who might've wanted one has already printed them for free) can put up their painstakingly rendered once-in-a-blue-moon works while putting a crimp in mass-produced straight-from-the-scanner doodles. (having been through this on the VCL forum, a lot of newbies don't understand that scanners do not produce ready-to-display output--that's why most of them include editing software)

---PCJ


----------



## kawayama (Oct 16, 2006)

can i change my voting? i voted 500+ before i read dragoneers first post.

i'd say 300k is a good limit. only my largest image was over 300k (310k at 812x1200 pixels, because of small text details). i could probably have compressed it a smidgen more to get it under 300k.

i think larger screen will get more and more common. i have a 20" monitor with 1680x1050 resolution, and i don't think i'm the only one. so i'd like the _image dimensions limit_ turned *off*, and a _image file size limit_ turned *on*. i have saved several images over 2000x2000 pixels at under 100k. yes, they had very few colours.

definitely implement some sort of avatar size limit. 30k, or even 20k.


----------



## WelcomeTheCollapse (Oct 16, 2006)

400KB at the absolute max. If you want more, donate.

/Hasn't donated yet.
//Plans to.


----------



## uncia2000 (Oct 16, 2006)

WelcomeTheCollapse said:
			
		

> 400KB at the absolute max. If you want more, donate.



Heck, just donate... 

It's not the file size that's the primary issue, it's the traffic. (*makes no mention of the 3,665k submission on FA which has been downloaded over seven thousand times, in case that brings the system to a grinding halt again*)

Could even argue that popular artists "should", off their own backs, feel more "accountable" for the community resources that they use, without having to limit other lesser-known members needlessly (file sizes, daily number of uploads, etc.).


----------



## SevenFisher (Oct 16, 2006)

I've noticed you guys has placed limit on avatars (well soon anyway, If I recall.) - I think that is good idea, I've seen some avatars that's around 100KB...

I've been creating about 50+ avatars (yeah, I used to often change my avatar on other boards ^o^;; ) and nobody of them has reached over 50KB....and that was before I've learned how to opimitze images. >> (I can get about 9.5k coloured avatar without ruining the ava :3)


----------



## uncia2000 (Oct 16, 2006)

SevenFisher said:
			
		

> (I can get about 9.5k coloured avatar without ruining the ava :3)


*nods*

=> previous page; e.g. for 14k. Color + animation. 






Definitely possible to work to a pretty tight limit, IMHO...


----------



## Dragoneer (Oct 16, 2006)

SevenFisher said:
			
		

> (I can get about 9.5k coloured avatar without ruining the ava :3)


I decided to go with the limit after seeing a user icon that was 200K -- that's larger than a good number of submissions!


----------



## Mitch_DLG (Oct 17, 2006)

With the upcoming hard cap of 25k for avatars, wish which I wholly agree, and say about 250k regular image cap, we could save a lot of bandwidth.  As some have said, maybe not a lot immediately, but over time it will save.  

As far as the avatars go, and how much bandwidth they eat, I'd personally like to suggest that the "is watching" portion be removed.  It's not necessarry, and it seems to eat a lot of wasted bandwidth, to me.  Not to mention I've already had it create drama with people whining that I won't watch them or something of that matter, but seriously, it's a major bandwidth eater.


----------



## Growly (Oct 18, 2006)

Mitch_DLG said:
			
		

> With the upcoming hard cap of 25k for avatars, wish which I wholly agree, and say about 250k regular image cap, we could save a lot of bandwidth.  As some have said, maybe not a lot immediately, but over time it will save.
> 
> As far as the avatars go, and how much bandwidth they eat, I'd personally like to suggest that the "is watching" portion be removed.  It's not necessarry, and it seems to eat a lot of wasted bandwidth, to me.  Not to mention I've already had it create drama with people whining that I won't watch them or something of that matter, but seriously, it's a major bandwidth eater.



I like the 'is watching' portion, but yeah, all the avatars should be removed. Maybe have avatars show up on mouseover, but have the links themselves be text links.
That would save a lotta room.


----------



## Firehazard (Oct 20, 2006)

Hanazawa said:
			
		

> I ignore preview images and go straight to fullsize because I can already tell from the small thumbnail if I want to see the big picture - the problem is the thumbnail doesn't tell me what the big picture's actual dimensions and/or filesize are.


Actually, adding the dimensions to the "mouseover" box wouldn't be such a bad idea.  Makes more sense than including the full description, and a lot more sense than including the creator's icon. :?

Also, two points about the icon size limit:

A lot of users get their icons from LJ icon communities/archives.  If our limit is the same as theirs, we can guarantee that icons found on such sites will work here, while still keeping the size within reasonable limits.
The "zillion icons on every page" problem can be fixed by copying Sheezy/dA and implementing a limit of X comments per page.  Or better yet, leave off all comments at first and make people click a link to show them.  Keeps the page cleaner, and keeps the page transfer down for users who just want to see the art.
In regard to unnecessarily-oversized images, it might be worth our while to allow users to "report" them to admins the same way we can report content violations.  Seems like enough users find huge images annoying enough to complain about anyway, so it's likely to be effective.


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## NightfallGemini (Oct 24, 2006)

I was wondering how long this'd take. :I

have a limit on avatars, sure, but don't limit the size of art. that'll drive people away which is the last thing you want.

EDIT:



			
				WelcomeTheWorstIdeaEver said:
			
		

> 400KB at the absolute max. If you want more, donate.




the whole point is that it's free for all to post their art. this kinda crumbles if you do it like that. :I

the way I see it, if you did it like that, it'd stop being a donation, and become a purchase of more space.


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## Damaratus (Oct 24, 2006)

NightfallGemini said:
			
		

> I was wondering how long this'd take. :I
> 
> have a limit on avatars, sure, but don't limit the size of art. that'll drive people away which is the last thing you want.



If explained in the proper fashion, I've found most artists to be reasonable.  Honestly, if someone presented you with a method that allowed you to compress your images to a smaller size with little or no loss to the actual quality that someone would see, while at the same time helping the site that you so enjoy using, wouldn't you take the offer?


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## lolcox (Oct 24, 2006)

*Saving Private Pipe:*

Things I'd consider to save bandwidth:

Add options for the following:
Hide Shouts
Hide Comments
Minimalistic UI (that means properly written XHTML 1.0 STRICT, with proper attribution. Allow users to manipulate the look on their end with user style sheets that are loaded FROM THE BROWSER, with extensions such as Stylish, as well as User JavaScript from extensions such as Greasemonkey, if they're in such need for features).
Avatars Toggle
Emoticons Toggle


What does this accomplish?
If comments viewing and shouts viewing are turned off, with avatars on?
Plenty. That's less text (and fewer avatars, by proxy) that is loaded by default per pageload. For those who didn't want the stuff that was switched off, that's a significant savings per pageload, which will add up rapidly. Also benefits those on narrowband connections (like me on my phone). Fewer hits to the MySQLd, too.
(However, I'm wondering if you guys are even caching any of the data generated, or if it's all a raw pull from the DB each time.)

Honestly, when I'm looking at FA, I'm usually cruising for porn, not for the commentary of furries ("I fapped to this. "). Thus, the ability to turn comments off (sure, one should be able to click a link and load the comments anyway, on a case by case basis) is quite welcome.
That defaults to skipping avatars unless I'd view a comments page.
On images that have 30 comments... Assuming each person had a 15kb avatar... I'd save 450 kilobytes of transfer on avatars alone.
Assuming 599 other people enabled the ability to skip viewing comments, that'd be 270 mb of savings on a single image page, by omitting the comments and their avatars.

If there were 19 other images, with 30 people commenting, 15 kilobyte avatars, and 600 people choosing to not view comments...
you save 5.4 GB of transfer. ;/

(These numbers are somewhat dramaticized, to prove the point of savings.)

Speaking of avatars: Allow JPEG, PNG.
Dipping into audio: Allow Vorbis, AAC+. Require person to download audio, rather than loading it inline. Every once in a while, I'll stumble into a music submission, mistaking it for an image. I don't want to hear Yattaro's latest "remix"; I want pr0n. :B



Things I re-suggest to artists:
JPEGoptim.
No, really, some of you could use a gentle squeeze on your artwork.
Saving a few kilobytes here and there adds up quickly when you're pushing a decent volume.


By the way, guys:
have you run those emoticons of yours through pngout yet?


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## dave hyena (Oct 24, 2006)

*RE: Saving Private Pipe:*



			
				lolcox said:
			
		

> Minimalistic UI (that means properly written XHTML 1.0 STRICT, with



Dragoneer said in this thread:

http://www.furaffinityforums.net/showthread.php?tid=3813

That a low-bandwidth UI is being worked on, but there are no promises as to how it will be.


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## NightfallGemini (Oct 24, 2006)

Damaratus said:
			
		

> NightfallGemini said:
> 
> 
> 
> ...



what about animated gifs and swfs? you're saying "NONE OF THOSE LOL."



> Honestly, if someone presented you with a method that allowed you to compress your images to a smaller size with little or no loss to the actual quality that someone would see



uh. I don't see you presenting a new magical compression scheme that still allows for animation. I see you imposing limits on art.

and "if explained in the proper fashion" reads as "HEY IF WE SPIN IT *JUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUST RIGHT* WE CAN DUPE THEM." the "proper fashion" would be truth, not spin. :I


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## Damaratus (Oct 24, 2006)

NightfallGemini said:
			
		

> what about animated gifs and swfs? you're saying "NONE OF THOSE LOL."



I'm not suggesting that I know the way to do this.  Simply giving a possibility.  I have no knowledge of how to compress down animated gifs or swfs, so I didn't comment on them.  Seems to me that you're just trying to cause problems Nightfall, perhaps you'd like to actually be helpful.



			
				NightfallGemini said:
			
		

> uh. I don't see you presenting a new magical compression scheme that still allows for animation. I see you imposing limits on art.
> 
> and "if explained in the proper fashion" reads as "HEY IF WE SPIN IT *JUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUST RIGHT* WE CAN DUPE THEM." the "proper fashion" would be truth, not spin. :I



Actually that's how you've decided to read it.  Explained in the proper fashion means: so as not to cause confusion in the masses.  I've seen plenty of methods that people have tried to pass to other artists that have been lost in the translation, therefore, a proper fashion would be one that is understandable and easily done by both the adept and the novice.

Additionally, I do not see you offering any particular solutions to such things either.  Rather then nitpicking and causing problems, perhaps you would also like to investigate methods in which people can post their artwork at higher file sizes without causing a massive loss of space on the servers.  I see a lot of complaining from you, but not a lot of solutions.

Unless, of course, you want to front the money to deal with the increase in space that would be necessary to keep everyone loading files at the sizes that they want.  I'm sure Fur Affinity would appreciate such generosity.


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## lolcox (Oct 24, 2006)

NightfallGemini said:
			
		

> uh. I don't see you presenting a new magical compression scheme that still allows for animation. I see you imposing limits on art.
> 
> and "if explained in the proper fashion" reads as "HEY IF WE SPIN IT *JUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUST RIGHT* WE CAN DUPE THEM." the "proper fashion" would be truth, not spin. :I



[truth]If it's such a goddamned issue with you, *GO BUY YOURSELF A HOSTING PACKAGE AND HOST YOUR OWN SHIT*.[/truth]







:roll:

Jesus, everywhere you go, someone has to complain when the admins try to find a way to keep the service they're providing WITHOUT A REQUIRED PAYMENT free, without resorting to useless shit like banners, popunders, popups, interstitial ads, etc.

Sure, there's no magical format for people who submit animations. You'd think that people would use enough common sense to try to keep the file sizes down, in the absence of a goddamn magical algorithm that makes people's work smaller.

For the rest, other users have suggested tools for aiding in shrinking file sizes.
I mean, jpegoptim, pngout, pngcrush/optipng all exist.
(As per gif, since it was so... debatable for several years, there're less tools that do anything that optimize that aging format for free, from what I have seen.)


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## NightfallGemini (Oct 25, 2006)

lolcox said:
			
		

> [truth]If it's such a goddamned issue with you, *GO BUY YOURSELF A HOSTING PACKAGE AND HOST YOUR OWN SHIT*.[/truth]



that also defeats the whole purpose of the site.

EDIT: nitpicking and causing problems? it's called criticism. I have my own twist on it. if it offends you that much, get thicker skin.


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## SevenFisher (Oct 25, 2006)

To be fair, others ar right...I'm grateful that FA is free site, and it does not have to restort using payment stuff to get "all" features and restoring to shitty adverts....

Seriously, all you're asking for more, which can be greedy of you - what do you expect from a free site that does need to focus on its bandwidth, making sure it doesn't take up much? Alot of bandwidth = more cash required from admins' wallets.

And people like you are trying to make them pay more =/ I think it's fair for them to do this, because I can see how bandwidth is issue, and it should take actions to reduce the bandwidth per day (or week? or Month?) so admins won't have to pay more, and it'll also help other FA members greatly to browse FA smoothly as possible.


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## Damaratus (Oct 25, 2006)

NightfallGemini said:
			
		

> that also defeats the whole purpose of the site.
> 
> EDIT: nitpicking and causing problems? it's called criticism. I have my own twist on it. if it offends you that much, get thicker skin.



No, it defeats your concept of the purpose of the site.  Generation of possible solutions is one thing, nitpicking details (for instance, talking about animated gifs when the whole of this thread previously was simply about regular image uploads, thus the title of the thread) doesn't actually help solve the problem at hand.  

Criticism yields results, you should come in with ideas to help, not just complaints as to what *you* have problems with, there are other places to voice such things and more positive ways to do it.

Your "own twist" seems to involve very little in terms of progressive thought on the subject.  Find a way to contribute positively on the topic, or go find another place to doll out your inanity.


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## BlueVon (Nov 3, 2006)

well really no pic should go over 5-10mb. if the pic it self is uber awesome and epic where it makes me think "y the fuck are u on this site if its better then everone elses?" then ya, i can understand it being huge so u can see all the lil details


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## Phoenix-D (Nov 3, 2006)

My .02:

 I've noticed this on a couple artist's pages, where they'll put up an image, then say "huh, FA made this small, go here to see the big one". I presume this is auto-resizing- if it is, it needs to go. If an image is too big, just say so and deny upload.

Second, shrinking or disabling avatars on comment and shout pages should be looked into to. Actually shrinking anything except the submissions should be looked at first. 

Third- compression, people.  You -can- make very large images without loosing much quality, as has been pointed out elsewhere in the thread. 500k+ really isn't needed except for absolutely MASSIVE pictures with huge amounts of colors. I run 1280x1024, and several of my favorites would be too big for wallpaper- but they're under 500kb.

I'd say around 3-400k would be good.

Also, does FA allow other file types? I've noticed all the images I download seem to be .jpgs, even for the black-and-white pictures that would be much better off as GIFs.


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## lolcox (Nov 3, 2006)

BlueVon said:
			
		

> well really no pic should go over *5-10mb*. if the pic it self is uber awesome and epic where it makes me think "y the fuck are u on this site if its better then everone elses?" then ya, i can understand it being huge so u can see all the lil details



What, pray tell, are you smoking?

I'd strangle you with your mother's large intestine if you attempted to upload an image that large.

We're talking about throughput. That is, how much pipe is spent to deliver hot smuts to the tables of furries worldwide.
As an example, I'll take an image that is 1 Mb in size to do the math.

One person: 1 Mb.
One hundred people: 100 Mb.
One thousand people: 1 *G*b.
Twenty thousand people: 20 Gb.

This is just for ONE IMAGE.

Imagine nine more images just as popular, and 20,000 people viewing them.



Imagine if no one saved the stuff to their hard drive, either. They're going to return to view the image again and again.

That's what the gripe is.

Moving on.

Phoenix-D, yes, FA does allow other formats, such as PNG, GIF, SWF.
Everyone seems to have the misconception that they have to upload as JPEG, and not experiment on compression.

In fact, there's someone upthread here that has a 937 Kilobyte image in his gallery. A PNG, no less.

He could seriously have turned it into a JPEG, and brought it down to 110 KB, and sacrificed almost nothing.



This shows about how much difference there was between the png and jpeg versions, after doing a difference in Gimp to see what would come out.
What I used: Irfanview (FREE), JPEGOptim (FREE). Gimp just to do the differences for layers.

It's nearly indetectible.

It's why I lean toward 350 KB as upper file size limit.
Ultra-high quality versions are what I expect to see on a site that's selling something.


Sadly, I'm just talking to the Evil Golden Arches at my Campground.


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