Let's talk about image size for submission.

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.

I do care and I am all for whatever it takes to have the images posted be optimized for presentation on this forum. I will rely on those of you that are running this forum and those of you with the experience on other forums (such as Mr. Sipress) to accomplish this. And, I greatly appreciate what you all are doing to run this forum. Great Work!

Dan Brown

I can see your problem and I think it really depends on the kind of image. Shorebirds with uniform BG look great at 80-100kB, a bird in grass or maybe even in a pine tree with lots of needles not so. I'd rather see a high quality image and maybe there can be a workaround such as hosting it elsewhere. I'm interested what other people think about this.

For me, I love to see big, high quality images ... especially on a site such as this where the artist-photographers have equally high skills, high standards, and high quality.

I am also mindful of the amount of theft that can occur ... as even larger and more high quality images may be presented. I am so amazed at even the really high quality REPOST (they are RE-SAVED JPEG's) already being done on this site ... on the supposedly inferior and limited 800 px, 150K JPEGS. It is just something else to think about!

I agree with thre file size issue. If one looks back at my posts, you would see I have commented on several images about posterized backgrounds. Some images appear quite bad in this regard. After doing some tests, I found that the posterization I see is due to jpeg compression. Most images with a smooth background shows the effect, and really detracts in my opinion.

While on the subject of file size, panoramic images are specified to be no more than 800 pixels in the horizintal direction. That ignores vertical panoramas.

Roger

200kb it is!
James