Another picture posting question...

[Gary - K7GLD]

Yes, I did a search, and read the FAQ on the subject...



BUT, I'm still puzzled as to WHY it is that I see SOME pictures posted on this board that are quite large and well defined, yet when *I* try to post one, I continue to get an error message that my pic is too large, until I finally reduce it down so far in size that it's nearly useless - with "moire" distortion and much lost detail...



I've tried various compression levels and more cropping than I really like to, but still seem to be doing something wrong compared to those other posters successfully posting MUCH larger, clearer photos = any clues?



On another related issue, not particularly a gripe, just another puzzle to me:



I surf other auto-related boards where they use LOTS of user avitars (pretty BIG ones at that, and many animated ones!), and actually ENCOURAGE members to post pictures - all of which are LARGE and with excellent resolution - these are boards seemingly using the same software as this one is - at least they are of the same appearance and operating characteristics - so, with all the improved hi-tech upgrades and capacity increases done to THIS board, why do we face so many restrictions and limitations?

 

[Steve St.Laurent]

There are several ways of posting pictures on the site. Uploading a picture directly to the boards is the most restrictive with a 32k max file size. The large pictures high res pictures that you see are posted by people putting them up on their own web space and then linking to those pictures. You can also put pictures in the reader's rigs album here and link to those, they will be larger and less restrictive than the ones in the forums - they can be up to 122k in size (a 122k picture will take ~34 seconds to download on a 28k dial-up connection). If you put pictures in your reader's rigs album there is a link at the bottom that says "forum codes", if you click on that it will give you the exact code to put in your message to have the picture show up in a thread. I can't speak to what other sites allow and why - I can only tell you what goes on here.



When you click on attach file those pictures are put into the mySQL database - which is a huge database with the amount of threads that we have in there. Right now the post database is 196,267,252 bytes (196 megabytes) and the index file is 27,117,568 (27 megabytes). The more pictures in that database the larger it would get and the slower searches would be.



When you upload a picture to the reader's rigs album it's just a file stored on disk instead of being stored in the database. When you link to a picture on your own web space it takes up no space or bandwidth here.



The amount of traffic we get is truly phenomenal when compared to other sites. Last month there were 18,521,632 hits and 103,700,487 bytes of data transferred from the server. My guess would be that on those other boards that you are looking at you may find that the large pictures are stored on individuals web space pages rather than on their own server. Comparing our traffic levels to the Ford diesel site for example when we last looked at it we had 6 times the amount of traffic that the Ford diesel site had at that time, even though they have twice as many registered users as we do - and they don't allow pictures on their site at all.



The avatars were removed because we found that by removing the avatars the amount of data transferred was reduced by 20% - and the avatars didn't add to the information passed along, they just made the site look fancier. Bandwidth costs money and we felt that the users were better served by spending that money elsewhere. In addition when we removed them we got many responses from users that were on dial up connections that they greatly appreciated the speed that pages in the forums loaded without the avatars - approximately a 50% increase in load time.



We try to balance between the needs/wants of all of our users and that includes those on dial up connections as well as high speed connections (dsl, cable, satellite, etc).



-Steve St. Laurent

webmaster

 

[RADdodge]

I wrote up a "little" proceedure that works to include pictures in your post larger than 32K. You need to have a place to post your pictures such as a personal web page, a photo storage site or the Reader's Rigs. Check it out.



https://www.turbodieselregister.com/forums/showthread.php?s=&threadid=54540