General Guidelines For Bandwith Savings And Posting Pictures.

duartix

Message 1/5

Most of us have probably noticed this site has been strugling with bandwith problems.
The solution Treebay had to come up with in the last few days was to defer image attachments. The forum isn't just the same, so here are a few ways everyone of us can help:

Bandwidth Help 1: Support the site .
Click the Make a donation button. A few bucks between a lot of users can make a diference paying for more bandwidth.

It's on the top right of your screen and looks like this:

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x-click-but21.gif (574 Bytes, 157 views)

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duartix

Message 2/5

Bandwidth Help 2: Most of the site's bandwidth is used by images. This is where everyone of us has to help.
Optimize your pictures! Here are a few rules of thumb:

Photos should be saved and posted as JPG.
JPG is good for photo-realistic images.

Drawings and images with solid colours (like screen captures) should be saved and posted as PNG or GIF.
99% of the times, PNG compresses better than GIF.

When saving to JPG try to achieve a compromise between quality and filesize but focus on the latest.
Save as progressive JPEG and remove EXIF information.
Also try to use the apropriate subsampling on your image editing aplication, here's an example:

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save as.png (11.6 KB, 181 views)

duartix

Message 3/5

In this page you will find Image Optimizer, which you can try out for free for 30(?) days.
It uses a scheme of compression called Magic Compression, that uses more compression where is less detail and less compression where is more detail. The savings are about 50% with almost no loss of detail.

Use the Magic compression slider at 100% and the JPEG quality as low as you feel confortable.

Here's an example:

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duarte.png (51.7 KB, 166 views)

duartix

Message 4/5

Avatars are images, and the bad thing about them is than even text only threads, can use a lot of them.

Bandwidth Help 3: Use smaller sized Avatars.

With the kind permission from DavidN, I'll post an example on how you can reduce your JPG avatar again with Image Optimizer (which I must insist, you can try out for 30 days).

Here's the example:

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davidn.png (24.4 KB, 161 views)

duartix

Message 5/5.

PNG and GIF images are lossless images, so unlike JPEG they rely on an indexed colour palette and a Huffman/LempelZiv compression scheme.

Most of the time PNG achieves better compression, but you can get further reductions if you reduce the numbers of colours used.

Again Image Optimizer does this for you.
Keep reducing the number of colours on your image and clicking the HiQ button to improove the colour palette for that number of colours.

Here's an example with one of the avatars available from the forum (which doesn't suport PNG for avatars):

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avatar.png (13.5 KB, 145 views)

duartix

If all of us help out by sticking to these guidelines, I'm sure we can reduce bandwidth by a large margin.

I wish I could contribute with in a Bandwidth Help 1 kind of way, but it's out of my reach. I also hope this guide will help. It's been my small contribution. This and Bandwidth Help n.2 ...

Cre8tive

I noticed another way to reduce bandwidth. After pictures had been turned off I found that when people replied to threads containing pictures I had already viewed, I didn't need to click the links (or at least not all of them) to remember what the thread was about. Many threads have multiple pictures, not all of which would need viewing each time someone revisits the thread to read new posts. I would be willing to leave links to pictures instead of having them automatically appear each time I view a thread. I however have cable internet access and don't know if this is a larger inconvienience for dial-up users.

Mark

__________________
ART - An object or event that evokes an aesthetic reaction—a sense of beauty, appreciation, harmony, and/or pleasure; the quality, production, expression, or realm of what is beautiful or of more than ordinary significance; the class of objects subject to aesthetic criteria

susieq

Is there a way to remove our pictures after a certain length of time, when the thread has pretty much run it's course? I would be happy to remove mine or have them removed after say 5 days or so...... No point in leaving them up there forever. Most of us have viewed at least every two days to see what's going on and after that the picture is just using up valuable space.

Cre8tive

Susieq,
I wouldn't like to see that happen due to the fact that I frequently do searches on topics that I am curious about. Some are more than a year old and would be of little use without the accompanying pictures.

Mark

__________________
ART - An object or event that evokes an aesthetic reaction—a sense of beauty, appreciation, harmony, and/or pleasure; the quality, production, expression, or realm of what is beautiful or of more than ordinary significance; the class of objects subject to aesthetic criteria