Posting pictures

New Member?, check this first.
Some do and don'ts and messages from headquarters, don't get deleted...
Locked
User avatar
robber57
Admin
Posts: 995
Joined: Sun Oct 10, 2010 9:24 am
Location: Heerhugowaard,Holland

Posting pictures

Post by robber57 » Sun Aug 19, 2012 2:25 pm

The owner of this forum has given us the ability to attach pictures/photos to our posts, thats quite generous as most forums do not offer this option,on these forums you will have to upload your pictures to a picture hosting site like tinypic or imageshack and put a link to the picture on your post surrounded by the "image tag" example: [img]www.picturehost.mypicture01.jpg[\img]

Although it is nice that we can upload pictures to hour site and directly add them to our post there is a limitation and thats server space, the pictures have to be stored somewhere and there is limited space for that.
That means i had to limit the amount of data each picture can take up.
For photos/pictures the limitations are: maximum pixel width and height 640x640 pixel and 128 Kilobyte data size.

If you have the ability to put pictures on a outside host we would appreciate it because as said; there is limited space, once that space has filled up i will have to address the owner asking for more space which in the end means more costs which can/will lead to advertisements(google-adds and such) on the board to cover costs.

How to make pictures compatible as attachment and process them so they give optimal viewing to other readers?, this is also applicable if you host the pictures on a outside host.

The best size to resize you pictures to is either 240 to 320 pixel width/height for a small photo and 640 pixel width/height for a large photo that shows at almost the width of the forum.
If you limit your pictures to these sizes you will also prevent that other readers will have to use horizontal scrolling to see your photo and the accompanying text below it.

How to prepare a picture?
Download irfanview : http://www.irfanview.com , there are additional language packs and plugins, these are not necessary,the software is free of charge and one of the best and easy to use viewer/editors available, it does a nice job on most actions you may want to do with pictures, that includes adding text and lines/drawing in the picture,simple color corrections and much more.

Start irfanview and open you photo (file/open), go to image/resize-resample and make settings as below:
irfanviewsettings.jpg
You fill in one of the sides(width or height) and the program will calculate the other side keeping the photo in the correct aspect ratio.
click "ok" , it may appear as nothing has happened but the photo is now in the new size.
safe the picture; go file/safe as... , choose the jpg format, name your photo and set the required compression with the jpeg "safe quality" slider.
Quality and file size go hand in hand but you will have to stay below 128 Kbyte and there is no real way in telling how big the file will be if you set it to for example 50%, it may be ok but it also still may be to big meaning you will have to decrease the slider.

experience tells me that usually between 25 and 75% will give a correct file size smaller then 128 Kb.
The option to set a fixed file size can also be used, this takes away the guessing what the file size will be but gives poor quality.
You do not have the required permissions to view the files attached to this post.
Failure is not an option, it comes bundled with the package.

Locked