VAF Image Hosting Sizing
 

DR can delete this post if it's out of line :rolleyes:

VAF now allows images to be hosted without using a third party hosting sight. This is great.

I noticed that many have been uploading very large image files. One recent post had about 6 images at 12MB apiece :eek:
These images could easily been resized to below 100KB. I'm guessing and I may be wrong but it seems to me continued uploading of these horrendously large files will break the bank.

Not to mention how us poor rural folks with limited internet speed will have to drink at least one beer per image waiting for them to display ;)

Maybe Doug has a solution that makes my concerns irrelevant. Hopefully Doug or a moderator will chime in and give us some guidance.

It's always a good idea to resize images for online work, and it's not very hard to do. My old Sony digital cameras produced native images at 2048x1535 pixels for a file size of about 1.08Mb. Oddly, just opening them in MS Paint and re-saving them would reduce the file size, but also selecting a 50% reduction produced an approximate 96Kb file size. These days, my phone has much higher resolution and produces images at 4032x3024 pixels and 3.51Mb! Resizing them at 30% gives a 1210x908 image at less than half a megabyte. I find that jpeg is still the winning format; png seems to inflate the file size.

I just use MS Paint because all I am doing is using the resize function, but there are many editors out there, both free (Gimp) and paid for (Photoshop) that can do the same thing and let you do other tasks. Paint has also proven sufficient to do things like put colored circles and arrows in images for emphasis (hums "Alice's Restaurant" ;) ). You can also use the crop function if you need the high resolution but don't need the whole picture, which also helps with file size. I keep my modified images in a separate folder from the originals so there is little chance of losing the original detail, should I need it at a different date. Since just the RV-10 project is running to over 2000 photos (and not done yet), you can see that the raw images take up a huge amount of space. No way would I try to put that online.

Any idea why the images sometimes get rotated 90 degrees?

For online images like here 800 X 600 or 1000 X 750 is probably fine in most cases and less than 200Kb file size. No need to post 3000 X 2000 pixel multi Mb photos which just eat up space and take longer to download.

Learning to use a photo editor isn't difficult.

I doubt if folks are using 36 inch high res monitors...

I’m also interested in how to eliminate the 90* shift. Plus, my choices are: small/medium/large. No reference to pixels or mb. Any idea what would be best?

testing pic

looks like uploading will reduce until the max (width or height) is 2048


Don't see any small/med/large options when uploading

My original file size was 866KB, it's now 139KB

It's an iPhone/iPad thing. You can read about it here.

EXIF "orientation" field ignored
 

The way that Apple does this is technically the "right" way, but many applications don't read the image EXIF data and then render the photo correctly.

The camera in the device only has one "correct" orientation, so when you take a photo, the device says "to display this photo correctly, you should rotate it 0/90/180/270 degrees". It does this using some metadata stored in the image called EXIF. Upload an image direct from your phone or tablet to this site to see all this information. http://exif-viewer.com

The field that decides how the image needs to be rotated to render it as you took it is called "orientation". If a program displaying the image does not take this value into account, it will be oriented in line with the physical camera, not the way the phone was oriented. You can see this on this website where sometimes the thumbnail is wrong, but the full image is correct.

The ugly "workaround" is to manually edit your photos which actually moves the image so that the orientation is set to the default, so programs that don't look at the exif data will still render the picture as you intended. This problem will be resolved by software upgrades eventually, some developers are faster than others.

There have been many Image Resizer tools over the years that would let you right-click on image files in your file browser and create reduced size versions easily. This is the latest incarnation of a tool that was started at Microsoft: https://github.com/microsoft/PowerTo...sizer-Overview

It's possible to have any image uploaded to VAF resized automatically on the server when it's uploaded.

The current vBulletin does do some resizing, it's setup with some modest restraints.

The vBulletin version is use is circa 2005 .. the newest version, once we do the upgrade, has a lot more flexibility.

The first attempt at the upgrade was a total mess so it may take some time :o

Bill, greatly appreciate the work both you and DR are doing! Some great work so far!

I am probably an offender as I uploaded the pics from my ipad. I will have to look for a way to size them before uploading. Sorry if I caused any issues.

Here's a great video on how to make your iPhone or iPad resize an image before sharing. Just follow the tutorial and resizing will be a snap from then on out ;)

HINT: Just make the width of your images 900 pixels during the tutorial and avoid the dreaded side scrolling to read posts

Nope, sorry, still side scrolls on my iPhone... :p My point being, that since there is no resolution standard for browsers, pick a reasonable size. 800 to 1024 isn't bad for tablets, with height proportional. If you really need the high resolution, you can host both and use the lower resolution image as a link to the higher one (requires a hosting service and won't work with the VAF attachment) so that the reader can decide for themselves whether to view the high resolution image. Meanwhile, the low res image doesn't hinder downloading for the casual viewer.

Well yea, on a phone :rolleyes:

Somewhere in the VAF info for photo placement there is a 900 pixel width recommendation.

The scrolling problem is solved if you add the image as an attachment and not as an inline photo. If you want the detail, you click on it to enlarge it, but you're expecting a large image at that point and don't mind scrolling.

For PC's I've been using ifranViewer for years. It's free and has more features than the usual MS free products.

https://www.irfanview.com/

Bob

Thats very true and one of the benefits of VAF hosting the images.

If VAF hosting images ends up working it will make this site even more valuable. So many image links broken, so much knowledge lost.

I just hope the indiscriminate uploading of excessively large images doesn't ruin this experiment

Hopefully that is the case OR the thing could just give a message and error out if the filesize is above a certain limit. No way everyone is going to police themselves on this.

That's what it does now, but the limit is rather high, IMO. 2MB images are allowed, but that could be cut back to 500kB and you'd lose none of the value. If there's any doubt about that, check out the ad posted for the RV-6 today... no image larger than 500kB, but all of them are larger than my HD screen when I click on them. Great detail and small image size.

You're right that people won't self-police on this unless you force them to do it themselves, or do it for them. That's why I think allowing *anything* to be uploaded, but processing it on the server down to a 500kB file (max, you wont' even need that for most of them) is the solution.

Upload away! It’s not a problem :)