I support not having to click on tumbnails - my company does not allow me to follow them, so I cannot enjoy the pictures in their full glory.

one further comment, I am not sure what the width restrictions/limitation for the initial diary body are, but - and this is a question - are they different from the width in the comment?

People on dial-up or slow broadband can still enjoy the diary by setting their comment display preferences to dynamic minimal which will collapse all the comments to a title line and allow (using javascript) individual comments to be loaded with a click of the mouse.

This has been a public-service announcement by a non-gnome.


Oye, vatos, dees English sink todos mi ships, chinga sus madres, so escuche: el fleet es ahora refloated, OK? — The War Nerd

A point I'm sure everyone has in mind, but that I'll stamp home with my great big oppressive management jackboots, is that all diaries here should be openly accessible to all members, lurkers, passers-by, newcomers. That's a fundamental principle of this type of collective blog, and it's secondarily important in helping attract new users to ET. There should be no question of photoblogging being a separate club within the community, reserved for those who have superior bandwidth/equipment.

We have to take into account a fairly wide range of bandwidths, running from dial-up to big broadband. (Don't forget also that people's Internet access may temporarily change when travelling.) Then we need to remember that, nice as it is to have visuals, the blog layout favours text. The central column can be pushed wide by an overwide pic. PeWi points out another constraint with work firewalls. That should rule out thumbnails. 600 px fits into a 1024x768 display, so that seems reasonable. (There is no difference, from this point of view, between the diary and the comments.)

This seems unfair to fine photos that deserve to be seen full-screen, but Scoop isn't the right content management system for that. Even the Web pic servers place limits.

You don't need Photoshop to reduce pics. Irfanview is freeware and efficient. I'm quite willing to give explanations on how to use it.
 

Here's that excellent Montmartre photo at 600 pixels wide and 98 Kb:

I downloaded the big version from Picasa (329 Kb and 1600 px wide) into Irfanview and :

1. cropped it ie reframed, cutting the car and stuff on the right);
   
2. resized it to 600 px wide;
   
3. saved it with the quality cursor on 89%, which is fairly high.

How does the quality look?

1. Use a sharpen filter after you resize. You'll get some of the original impact back. The best setting is usually 1-2 pixels for the sharpening radius, and 50-70% for the amount. If you can see halos around sharpened edges, you've overdone it.

2. In recent versions of Photoshop, use the Bicubic Sharper option when shrinking down. In older versions the one-size-fits-all resize will do.

3. When compressing, the file size depends on the detail in the image. If you sharpen a lot, you'll get a much bigger file than if you sharpen a little. Usually you don't need to sharpen much.

4. Noise and textures count as detail. There's not much you can do about this cheaply.(There are noise removal tools that can be used, but they're not very affordable.) For heavily textured and noisy photos, stick with the 100K limit, even though the compressed version will usually look less attractive than the original.

[Can the Irfanview experts add some hands-on tips here...?]

My two copper clad zinc tokens.  I have something of the worst of both worlds.  At work we have lots and lots of bandwidth, but also lots of corporate traffic.  Best I can tell, our firewalls filter anything from photobucket, imageshack, or youtube.  So far they seem not to have noticed flickr.  Sshh, don't tell them.

At home I am stuck with dialup.  I really, really, really, hope that I may be able to get something approaching broadband soon (thanks, by the way, to our local electric cooperative, who is putting up rural wireless sites as fast as they can), but it hasn't happened yet.  To make matters worse, my machine masquerades for two others in the house.  For most of primetime every evening we have three hard core internet junkies vying for bandwidth on a mediocre dialup connection.  

Son is a serious gamer who could tie up a broadband connection all by himself if we let him.  We've already looked at satellite internet service, but word is the ping times are worse than dialup, so not a good option from his point of view.

The Momcat is an artist who tends to gravitate to graphics heavy sites.  During the day she has the link to herself a good part of the time, so she tries to lighten up during crunch time, but still.

I'm more verbally oriented.  I appreciate good graphics, but long load times always become a test of my patience.  When all three of us get busy surfing in the evening, a graphics heavy page can take several minutes to load.  When that happens, it becomes a contest between my interest in the page at hand and my patience.  Fairly often I end up aborting the download if it takes very long.  My loss, I know, and I'm sure I miss out on a lot of good stuff, but there it is.

So, I very much appreciate the thrust of this discussion.  How do you find the balance between sharing the benefits of technology and community so dear to us all while accommodating those of us still limited by circumstance.  It shows the sort of mutual consideration that makes ET such a special community.

Somewhere in cyberspace, the ghost of de Chardin is smiling.

My general approach is the same as yours - 100kb limit if at all possible. Then on top of that a link to a high res, ~1 megabyte version if the photo warrants it.  This diary should have had a poll on internet access speeds, by the way.

you are the media you consume.

i am pretty ungeeky, so i really don't understand why dial-up is so sketchy some days. and others rolls out decently.

i suspect that the isp company waits till the servers are groaning, then adds more horsepower, creating an ebb and flow in the speed that pages arrive on the screen.

i've been to internet cafes where there is broadband, though i don't know how fast and wide, and it's not that much faster than dial-up on a good day, but every month or so, it gets paralytic and for 2-3 days it can take 5 minutes to show a page of text without any pix at all.

likewise on a good day, a thread that's rodded with pix and graphics comes in a lot slower, but then i just leave that tab to finish, and meanwhile read another, lighter one.

supposedly broadband will arrive here next month....again....

if i had a euro for every time i heard that!

1 mb claimed download speed, €30 p.month, wireless.

"Two wrongs don't make a right, but three lefts do." Jim Hightower

First: no one read the FAQing New User Guide!

It's good to limit image width to 400 pixels in diaries, or at least their above-the-fold part. You may use up to 600 pixel widths when posting an image in the comments: if your comment is not a response.

That was written when we still took afew's screen in its 800x600 setting into account. Still, I would say:

• In the above-fold part, it's good to put a smaller image; in case the diary gets promoted, also consider image host bandwidth. I use 400 pixels.

• On a 1024x768 screen, two years ago I found that an image that doesn't burst the frame in the diary body is not 600 but 590 pixels wide, to which I generally kept below the fold ever since (while all the screens I view ET on are now set to higher resolutions).

I didn't and won't purchase Photoshop, I use Irfanview or GIMP. When re-sizing with Irfanview, I set the sharpener to 5 to 15. I almost always save JPEG files at 85% compression, which at the given image size can end up up to 145 kB big, but less than 100 on average. Given my preferred photo objects (complex landscapes, buildings/structures, trains), I'm bound to have significantly bigger than 22 kB pictures.

I have broadband, but where I am, sometimes the network bandwidth to the photo host's site limits download speed; say a diary with ten pictures of 1 MB together may take ten seconds. I'd rather not have diaries with more than 40 images altogether (in the diary & comments).

As for office filtering, my employer used to filter almost all image and video hosts I know, but after the computer service department got too many complaints from me for blocking stuff I need for work, they just cut a personal hole for me across the firewall...

*Traitor*, n.
A benighted individual who perceives an illusory distinction between serving his nation and abetting the criminals who govern it.