Jeffrey Sipress
05-08-2008, 10:40 PM
Some here may have noticed (or will soon) that one of my images was selected for IOTW, yet was not displayed within that posting because it exceeded size limits. It did appear on my original post in the Landscape forum and showed up just fine. The comment was that the BPN server couldn't handle the file size of over 150K. I didn't expect James would bag the file and put it on his server rather than just link to it on my server, as originally done in my post. That way it is only a link and the BPN server is not involved. That would solve one problem, no storage issues for him!
But I think we can perhaps take another look at pixel dimensions and file sizes. The rules here say no greater than 800 pixels on the longest side, which I think is just fine, although personally, I have a huge folder of jpegs that may not always meet that requirement (but that's not your problem). Then there is the file size, which BPN says should not be over 150K. That's not too good. In today's case, I opened up the master psd and created a resized 800 pxl jpg from it. But, at that dimension, I had to use a quality value of 45 to keep it under 150K. Not the best presentation! It doesn't make sense. Big pixel size, but too much compression for the file size limit. Of course, every image will compress differently depending in the nature of the content. Aside from the fact that I won't be able to use so many excellent jpgs that I have already created, I do believe that the size limit should be 200K, as many sites allow. Over years, I have created a folder of these jpegs for posting on the Fred Miranda site, where I am a moderator. I also created another folder of the same images limited to 720 on a side for posting over on NaturePhotographer.net, where they DO host all images and the size limit there is 200K! I certainly do not want to spend days creating yet another version of all these images!
I'm sure most of you really don't care at all about all this rubbish, wondering why I care about this, and are happy to stay with small jpegs. Landscapes are different, usually with more content that the typical wildlife/bird image, which I'm still working on learning to do.
But I think we can perhaps take another look at pixel dimensions and file sizes. The rules here say no greater than 800 pixels on the longest side, which I think is just fine, although personally, I have a huge folder of jpegs that may not always meet that requirement (but that's not your problem). Then there is the file size, which BPN says should not be over 150K. That's not too good. In today's case, I opened up the master psd and created a resized 800 pxl jpg from it. But, at that dimension, I had to use a quality value of 45 to keep it under 150K. Not the best presentation! It doesn't make sense. Big pixel size, but too much compression for the file size limit. Of course, every image will compress differently depending in the nature of the content. Aside from the fact that I won't be able to use so many excellent jpgs that I have already created, I do believe that the size limit should be 200K, as many sites allow. Over years, I have created a folder of these jpegs for posting on the Fred Miranda site, where I am a moderator. I also created another folder of the same images limited to 720 on a side for posting over on NaturePhotographer.net, where they DO host all images and the size limit there is 200K! I certainly do not want to spend days creating yet another version of all these images!
I'm sure most of you really don't care at all about all this rubbish, wondering why I care about this, and are happy to stay with small jpegs. Landscapes are different, usually with more content that the typical wildlife/bird image, which I'm still working on learning to do.