FlytrapCare Carnivorous Plant Forums

This is a small request to resize your photos when you take them off your camera. Please try to make the file size less than 1MB before you upload them to the server. Today, May 21st 2010, the server ran out of disk space. I was able to free up more space, but there will come a day when the server will need to be upgraded and, unfortunately, a server upgrade isn't free.

Please don't let this discourage you in any way from uploading photos. I just ask that you be aware of the size of your photos and resize them if you're able to.

Oblivion wrote a good tutorial on how to resize and crop your images here:
http://www.flytrapcare.com/phpBB3/tutor ... t6232.html

1MB is a lot of space for one photo. 0,5mb will do, what you guys think about that? Another thing with these large files is that we have to wait longer for them to load, which is very annoying

Some tips on reducing file size:

Cameras (usually) save in the highest quality format they can, with huge resolutions. This is why "fresh" pictures are about 10+ MB nowadays. There are free utilities that will resize images, the most popular being GIMP (And the Mac Version). Adobe Photoshop will also do the trick, if you happen to have that. I typically save my images in some fixed proportion of the original, always less than 1000 pixels x 1000 pixels.

Cameras usually save in .jpg or .bmp, both of which are pretty bloated filetypes. MS Paint (And GIMP) will "save as" in the .png format, an excellent format that greatly reduces file size without any noticeable loss in quality.

If you're concerned, these changes won't make the picture any smaller than what the forum displays in a post nor do they noticeably decrease quality. I typically can change a picture from my Samsung 12 megapixel camera from being about 15 MB to about 250 KB with no picture difference. By doing that, I could have 60 pictures instead of just one!

I also recommend hosting your image off site (Photobucket and Imgur are both good and free, Imgur is definitely my favorite though!) Then, use the forum's Img tags ([img]photo_url[/img]) to display them here like you would. Then there's no strain whatsoever on the server's HDD.

If you'd like help in this process, please let me know! It takes no more than 30 seconds from start to finish once you get the idea down

Or-- Just host your photos on another free server on the Internet and then insert them into messages here at the FlytrapCare Forum by using the "Img" button in the editors. That will help save space here at the FlytrapCare.com Internet server.

I use TinyPic.com. It's free and unfussy (compared to ImageShack or PhotoBucket or whatever). Here's a photo I uploaded to TinyPic.com and then inserted into this reply. The real URL (web address) of the photo is http://i40.tinypic.com/70zy8z.jpg, and I simply pasted that URL between the tags created by the "Img" button in the editor, like this--

Thanks for the very helpful options handerplants and Steve.

moof wrote:Another thing with these large files is that we have to wait longer for them to load, which is very annoying

Very true. There are quite a few threads on the forum now that take a very long time to load.

Something else to consider is that not only do those large images eat up disk space, but every time someone views a thread with a bunch of photos in it, that uses server bandwidth, which also costs money.

Tinypic is a good one too; but to clear things up: the sites I mentioned are also free!

Keep in mind when uploading elsewhere that sites will have a file size and resolution limit, so you'll likely have to go through some conversion process before uploading.

handerpants wrote:Tinypic is a good one too; but to clear things up: the sites I mentioned are also free!

Imgur.com looks great! Thanks for that link, Handerpants. I might end up liking it better than TinyPic.com. Anyway, all of these are good ideas: to crop and scale pictures (I use the Gimp for that too, as well as loads of other graphics production and processing, in Linux), and to host them on another free image server on the Internet instead of uploading them here to the FlytrapCare.com server.

handerpants wrote: MS Paint (And GIMP) will "save as" in the .png format, an excellent format that greatly reduces file size without any noticeable loss in quality.

Actually png is lossless compression, so there's NO loss in quality

As others have said, I never upload photos to the actual site (except for today in the photo contest since it was part of the rules). I always upload to photobucket and link the images. Not only does that free server room, but it also allows me to manage all of my online photos in one place.

okay, well I'll have to try this.

okay matt i will do this. lot of info on the subject here too

Matt, could you not do a mash up of twitpic or some other site that will allow you to put up the pictures on the other hosting site under each person's account?

simply reducing files to 1024x768 ,jpg will give a good quality image and a size of around 200kb.

imho, pictures shouldnt exceed about 350kb on average.

BMP format is a huge no-no. massive file size.

image shack and photobucket are ok, but i'd use them two as a last resort as 9 out of 10 times on a forum you will eventually get the "exceed bandwidth" image instead of showing the image... making anyone reading the thread in a month or two view it without any active pictures.

most ISP's give you a set amount of bandwidth with your internet account, so you can host your own small private website or blog.
this is ideal storage for your pictures !

Adam wrote:Matt, could you not do a mash up of twitpic or some other site that will allow you to put up the pictures on the other hosting site under each person's account?

I'm not really that concerned with hosting the photos elsewhere. My main reason for making the initial post was to make people aware that it's really unnecessary and wasteful to upload photos directly from your camera to the server without at least doing a minimal resize (though I'm very grateful for all of the other suggestions given here about how to display photos on the forums).

I actually like the idea of having all of the photos hosted on the site for many reasons and I'm not opposed to upgrading the server when the time comes. I just don't want to see a ton of photos uploaded that are all 5x to 10x larger in size than they could be while still giving the same effect.

you can get a gallery plug in for the forum, give each person xxx mb storage space in it, option to restrict file sizes so only a file under xx kb can be uploaded, etc.

one forum im on request a donation to get gallery access.. a one-off 10 buck donation isnt really a big thing for gallery access, and it helps pay the added hosting expenses.

this also helps the continuity of a thread for the long term.. aint nothing worse than researching a problem with your plant and all the relevant threads have a where there used to be an image, making it impossible to see what someone elses sick plant looked like and compare it to your own.

Oblivion wrote:you can get a gallery plug in for the forum, give each person xxx mb storage space in it, option to restrict file sizes so only a file under xx kb can be uploaded, etc.

I have raised the max upload size to something like 8MB just to prevent people from being discouraged when uploading. I guess that shows where my level of concern about conserving hard drive space as opposed to restricting uploads is.

Oblivion wrote:one forum im on request a donation to get gallery access.. a one-off 10 buck donation isnt really a big thing for gallery access, and it helps pay the added hosting expenses.

I like this idea. I suppose it wouldn't hurt to set up a link to ask for donations to help cover hosting expenses in exchange for an added benefit to the user's account.

Oblivion wrote:aint nothing worse than researching a problem with your plant and all the relevant threads have a "red X" where there used to be an image, making it impossible to see what someone elses sick plant looked like and compare it to your own.

Very true! And that's why I'd almost rather see the photos uploaded directly to this server. But of course, it would be much better if the photos were resized to a reasonable resolution (1024x768 is more than sufficient in most cases) so that they are somewhere around 250K in size.