Picture posting limitations?

[tlc]

Now that I finally have good internet and can handle large filesizes and videos... Are there any rules or limitations on this site for posting pictures? Whether it be filesize, quantity per post, etc. ? I searched but couldn't find anything.

This never came into play for me before. I'm still reducing my pictures to around 100k or so, out of respect to server space and those with slow connections or limited data.

 

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This never came into play for me before. I'm still reducing my pictures to around 100k or so, out of respect to server space and those with slow connections or limited data.

I usually do the same as long as it's not going to degrade picture quality too much.

I just noticed today that acceptable image formats now also include webp, that wasn't the case until recently.

To get around the format issue you can also include images in posts by linking directly to the image source instead of uploading the image to the forum:

 

[tlc]

I usually do the same as long as it's not going to degrade picture quality too much.

I just noticed today that acceptable image formats now also include webp, that wasn't the case until recently.

To get around the format issue you can also include images in posts by linking directly to the image source instead of uploading the image to the forum:

View attachment 140960

My iPhone starts them as heic and huge filesize. So I email them to myself, and save them to files. That lets me reduce them, and it turns them to jpg. But this site turns them into webp for me when I upload them. No other website has done that. I've never even heard of webp before. I guess whatever it needs to do to work is fine with me.

 

[Judge]

Best to start by uploading images that are only 72 dots per inch. I tend to try to keep them no more than 1000 pixels across at times...though that still makes for a large image.

Image file editing is easy for me with Photoshop. If I want to save a webp file, I usually save it in Gimp 2.10 and then convert it to another format. Though I do tend to clean it up a bit after reducing the file size...usually requiring a minor amount of "sharpening".

Though in reality I suspect few posters even are aware of such courtesies to our host.

 

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Best to start by uploading images that are only 72 dots per inch.

Dots per inch is relevant only to printing and nothing else. Pixels are pixels and how they're spaced is entirely dependent on the graphics card and software used to display the picture. You can set the dots per inch to whatever you like and it's not going to make a lick of difference to how it appears on people's screens.

My iPhone starts them as heic and huge filesize.

Yep, I've been sent a couple of those in emails, ridiculously huge. I post quite a few of my own pics in here from time to time from a proper camera, they're also huge files, average 10 Mb. As a standard shortcut I reduce the image size to 25% of it's original (scale image) and I set jpeg compression to 85%.

 

[Judge]

Dots per inch is relevant only to printing and nothing else. Pixels are pixels and how they're spaced is entirely dependent on the graphics card and software used to display the picture. You can set the dots per inch to whatever you like and it's not going to make a lick of difference to how it appears on people's screens.

My observation has always been that If you change the DPI settings you can instantly- and drastically reduce the file size without losing a lot of detail. A simple way of instantly reducing a file for online purposes rather than retain the original default DPI settings. Particularly if they come from a cellphone. More convenient for lesser experienced users.

A good rule of thumb especially for those who may not be experienced in a need to reduce file sizes for online purposes. Reminds me as well how Macs used to default to rendering at I think around 96 DPI. For a printer I get your point, but I was a website designer. Though it was more about text than images. Sometimes awkward in getting cross-browser compliance with not only different browsers, but also different operating systems using competing DPI settings.

 

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My observation has always been that If you change the DPI settings you can instantly- and drastically reduce the file size without losing a lot of detail.

That depends on what software you're using, by rights setting the dots per inch shouldn't make any difference whatsoever to the file size - the number of pixels in the picture. It should merely be an instruction set for a digital printer on how closely together the pixels are placed. This was my trade, I was a printer for more than 20 years.

 

[Judge]

That depends on what software you're using, by rights setting the dots per inch shouldn't make any difference whatsoever to the file size - the number of pixels in the picture. It should merely be an instruction set for a digital printer on how closely together the pixels are placed. This was my trade, I was a printer for more than 20 years.

I just took a 300 DPI file at 6 X 4 inches and saved it without layers. The layered file size went from 14.6MB to 3.9MB.

But when I took the same 300 DPI file at and changed the DPI alone to 72, it went from 3.9MB to 261.8KB. It makes quite a difference in the long haul, particularly for web hosts who treasure disk space on their servers.

Something I've been doing since I got Photoshop 4.0 for web design some 29 years ago.

 

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I just took a 300 DPI file at 6 X 4 inches and saved it without layers. The layered file size went from 14.6MB to 3.9MB.

But when I took the same 300 DPI file at and changed the DPI alone to 72, it went from 3.9MB to 261.8KB. It makes quite a difference in the long haul, particularly for web hosts who treasure disk space on their servers.

That will be the difference between Photshop Express and the professional version.

It's also a serious Windows issue and why Windows never got a look in to the graphic design industry, Windows uses printer drivers to format graphics, so how your page layout appears is entirely dependent on what printers you have installed. Take your file to a different Windows machine with a different printer and all the onscreen formatting changes too, not just how it prints out.

The Macintosh versions of programs like Photoshop work entirely differently and completely independently from the printer.

 

[Judge]

That will be the difference between Photshop Express and the professional version.

I have only the professional versions. Photoshop 4.0/4.1 (1996) and to date Photoshop 5.5 (1998) I've never used their pared down version. Though even in my time as a web designer, the full version of Photoshop was the absolute industry standard. Keeping in mind that printing concerns were utterly irrelevant for my job.

As long as I can use older full versions I'm good to go in Linux. Though I'm a bit skeptical I could make either work in the dreaded Windows 11. But they are nowhere as fancy as the present versions....especially with generative AI functionality. Admittedly that would be fun to play with, but not at the price of highway robbery.

 

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As long as I can use older full versions I'm good to go in Linux. Though I'm a bit skeptical I could make either work in the dreaded Windows 11.

I agree with you there, but even if you have the "professional" versions what you have is the Windows versions and they're relying on printer drivers for page formatting.

Especially in the late 90s and early 2000s we had a lot of young "graphic designers" pumped out by TAFE colleges with no actual industry experience, and a lot of them would try to create files for us to make our plates from using Windows computers. We'd check them on our own Macs first and see how bad the formatting had shifted, if it wouldn't take too much correcting we'd just fix it and carry on but there was also a lot of times where we simply had to reject their artwork as unprintable.

 

[Judge]

I agree with you there, but even if you have the "professional" versions what you have is the Windows versions and they're relying on printer drivers for page formatting.

Especially in the late 90s and early 2000s we had a lot of young "graphic designers" pumped out by TAFE colleges with no actual industry experience, and a lot of them would try to create files for us to make our plates from using Windows computers. We'd check them on our own Macs first and see how bad the formatting had shifted, if it wouldn't take too much correcting we'd just fix it and carry on but there was also a lot of times where we simply had to reject their artwork as unprintable.

With web design back then, all I had to be certain of were the exact pixel dimensions of those 72 DPI graphics relevant to the code I created. Though on occasion I still recall having to make Java Scripts to render them appear relatively the same between the iMac and PC in my workstation. And with text boxes it could be a real challenge at times. I still recall so many of our competitors who simply didn't bother with cross-compliant browser web pages.

Often simply making people rely on MSIE.

 

[Judge]

While printing sizes remain the same with different DPI settings, the images expressed in pixels change dramatically along with the overall file size as seen on a monitor.

Example: Two of the same images with different DPI settings as seen in Photoshop:

300 DPI Image: 1728 x 1152 pixels. Print size: 5.764" x 3.833" (rounded off)
072 DPI Image: 415 x 276 pixels. Print size: 5.764" x 3.833" (not rounded off)

The fewer pixels, the lower the file size and thus less bandwidth is taken in uploading the image. If these were to be printed, they would be identical in physical dimensions, but not in image quality. Viewed on your monitor, seeing is believing. The lower the DPI setting, the smaller the image which conserves server space. More space on the server, the better its performance.

The good news: To my knowledge our host does not enforce such things. I just consider it a courtesy though, to resize the file density of very large bitmap images on general principle.

Even though the forum is set up only to upload compressed format files like jpg. Data compression helps, but you can still create some might huge files even in that format, depending on the level of compression one uses when saving a jpg file. And not everyone is necessarily aware of such considerations.

 

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While printing sizes remain the same with different DPI settings, the images expressed in pixels change dramatically along with the overall file size as seen on a monitor.

Yes, it's "scaling" the image, which it should not be doing. In Gimp "scale image" and "print size" are two completely different options as they should be because "pixels per inch" is only relative to printing and nothing else.

Pixels per inch simply doesn't make sense outside of the print world. Including my laptop I have 3 different monitors that default to 1920x1080, from 16 inch to 27 inch - setting an image size in inches is going to look very different on each of those screens.

 

[Judge]

Pixels per inch simply doesn't make sense outside of the print world.

In this context it's just a simple and fast way of reducing a bitmap image in Photoshop to a manageable file size online to preserve server space. Intended as a simple courtesy to our host who does not have any particular limitations over bitmap (,jpg) images.

Whatever you choose to call it, it's just a numerical value you state to lower the resolution to make it happen. It's not about printing anything. Just being considerate for anyone who knows how to resize a large bitmap image. No point in arguing over that.

I'm just grateful the OP brought this issue up, which doesn't often come up when it comes to basic images. They can get pretty large this days coming from very large megapixel cameras that may reside on cloud servers that can absorb that kind of bandwidth.