New Mars Forums

Palomar

Member

From: USA

Registered: 2002-05-30

Posts: 9,734

Re: Posting Images - ...especially *large* ones

*Can't help noticing that very recently more and more people are taking to posting images within their posts (particularly in the Unmanned Probes folders) -- and some of them are rather large, with noticeable "bulge" of the post itself as compared to surrounding posts.  Does this have the potential to weigh down a thread and more easily cause it to collapse?  IIRC, Josh (?) has mentioned previously that long (wordy) posts seem to cause a thread to collapse more easily.

I myself have -occasionally- posted images, but usually post hyperlinks. 

Just wondering, especially as there is a noticeable download drag when opening up a page with huge images in them. 

Thanks! 

--Cindy

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We all know [i]those[/i] Venusians: Doing their hair in shock waves, smoking electrical coronas, wearing Van Allen belts and resting their tiny elbows on a Geiger counter...

--John Sladek (The New Apocrypha)

John Creighton

Member

From: Nova Scotia, Canada

Registered: 2001-09-04

Posts: 2,401

Website

Re: Posting Images - ...especially *large* ones

It is too bad there is no way to set the size of the image when you post it. It would also be nice if there was an alternate text attribute so if the image link got killed a post that had formula images would still make sense.

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Dig into the [url=http://child-civilization.blogspot.com/2006/12/political-grab-bag.html]political grab bag[/url] at [url=http://child-civilization.blogspot.com/]Child Civilization[/url]

Josh Cryer

Moderator

Registered: 2001-09-29

Posts: 3,830

Re: Posting Images - ...especially *large* ones

Hmm, I doubt they'd allow the threads to collapse, and I just realized something, that you can make a post with 65kB of text, that's huge, that's like a friggin novel. It is true that there seems to be a correlation between long posts and threads collapsing. I'm contemplating turning that 65kB post length limit down a bit, but I don't know what it would do to the posts that we already have in the database. (We seriously need to switch to MySQL Adrian, heh.)

Anyway, being with dialup has its problems, I hate picture loading threads (though I tolerate them because they prove interesting). There doesn't seem to be a way to limit the size/resolution of the images, though. The only way I can think is for mods to go in and edit the images down, but that honestly is a bit excessive.

An alternative is to post sized down images on ImageShack (which I do for some people whose icons are huge), but then that comes with its own copyright problems and I don't even want to think about it.

But nah, to answer the question, it shouldn't affect the database or anything, the images are hosted offsite. The load times are due to the images being big probably. Try loading a picture intensive page on dialup!

Hope that answers your question.

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Some useful links while MER are active. [url=http://marsrovers.jpl.nasa.gov/home/index.html]Offical site[/url] [url=http://www.nasa.gov/multimedia/nasatv/MM_NTV_Web.html]NASA TV[/url] [url=http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/mer2004/]JPL MER2004[/url] [url=http://www.spaceflightnow.com/mars/mera/statustextonly.html]Text feed[/url]
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The amount of solar radiation reaching the surface of the earth totals some 3.9 million exajoules a year.

SpaceNut

Administrator

From: New Hampshire

Registered: 2004-07-22

Posts: 28,838

Re: Posting Images - ...especially *large* ones

Is the code button for html?

Example html code line:
<P ALIGN="CENTER"><A HREF="Project Constellation Editorials Archives_files/ss1-cartoon.jpg"><IMG SRC="Project Constellation Editorials Archives_files/ss1-cartoon.jpg" BORDER=0 WIDTH=428 HEIGHT=321></A></P>

The original time this was posted on Jame's Project Constellation site it had a width=*** that were off the page, changing to something smaller worked fine in that case.

MarsDog

Member

From: vancouver canada

Registered: 2004-03-24

Posts: 852

Re: Posting Images - ...especially *large* ones

Anything more than 320 x 240 should be automatically resized.
A link to full size could be provided below.

I am only running 600 x 800.

Josh Cryer

Moderator

Registered: 2001-09-29

Posts: 3,830

Re: Posting Images - ...especially *large* ones

HTML is disallowed because it would let people do naughty things, and we can't have that. Resizing how images are displayed could be helpful, but it wouldn't stop the slow page loading Cindy notices. Heh, for example SpaceNut had a .jpg for his Avatar that was several hundred k, but IkonBoard only lets you have 64x64 icons. I resized his, saved it as .gif and uploaded it to ImageShack.

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Some useful links while MER are active. [url=http://marsrovers.jpl.nasa.gov/home/index.html]Offical site[/url] [url=http://www.nasa.gov/multimedia/nasatv/MM_NTV_Web.html]NASA TV[/url] [url=http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/mer2004/]JPL MER2004[/url] [url=http://www.spaceflightnow.com/mars/mera/statustextonly.html]Text feed[/url]
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The amount of solar radiation reaching the surface of the earth totals some 3.9 million exajoules a year.

GraemeSkinner

Member

From: Eden Hall, Cumbria

Registered: 2004-02-20

Posts: 563

Website

Re: Posting Images - ...especially *large* ones

Hmm, I doubt they'd allow the threads to collapse, and I just realized something, that you can make a post with 65kB of text, that's huge, that's like a friggin novel. It is true that there seems to be a correlation between long posts and threads collapsing. I'm contemplating turning that 65kB post length limit down a bit, but I don't know what it would do to the posts that we already have in the database. (We seriously need to switch to MySQL Adrian, heh.)
Anyway, being with dialup has its problems, I hate picture loading threads (though I tolerate them because they prove interesting). There doesn't seem to be a way to limit the size/resolution of the images, though. The only way I can think is for mods to go in and edit the images down, but that honestly is a bit excessive.
An alternative is to post sized down images on ImageShack (which I do for some people whose icons are huge), but then that comes with its own copyright problems and I don't even want to think about it.
But nah, to answer the question, it shouldn't affect the database or anything, the images are hosted offsite. The load times are due to the images being big probably. Try loading a picture intensive page on dialup!
Hope that answers your question.

With the right compression you can manage fairly quick loading images that are fairly small a 640 x 480 image I posted to http://www.newmars.com/forums/viewtopic.php?t=209]this thread was only 44kb in size and it did not drop too much in getting the file size down so far.

However I have to agree that image heavy threads can be a pain to load on dial up, thats one of the reasons I stopped posting as much to New Mars. My dial up was so slow the early Spirit & Opp thread pages could take an age to load, thankfully the dial up has gone and I can view the pages quickly on ADSL.

If it becomes a problem with images dragging down the threads, I'm quite happy using a low res small image with my posts and placing a link to a higher res one.

Graeme

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There was a young lady named Bright.
Whose speed was far faster than light;
She set out one day
in a relative way
And returned on the previous night.
--Arthur Buller--