A polite request to my fellow LJ addicts

[thatcrazycajun]

I appreciate that you have pictures you want to share with us, and I enjoy seeing them. But when you do post them, please scale them down from a size that takes up the whole damned screen width and requires scrolling up/down the page to see the whole image, or anything above/below it on my friends page.

In general, photos should never be wider than 50 percent of the average computer monitor's screen width, or half of around 750 pixels.If the image is vertically oriented (i.e., tall rather than wide), this should be calculated from the height rather than the width. LJ's rich text editor contains an image-insertion dialog that allows specifying width and height of an image either by number of pixels or percent.

If there is some compelling reason to post a very large image, please place it back of a cut with a link explaining what is in the picture. This preserves your friends' precious friends-page real estate and makes it easier to choose whether they wish to use up the heavy bandwidth of displaying a large image. And for heaven's sake, please make sure the resolution is no more than 72 dpi; many digital cameras take photos at a high-resolution default setting, including my own, which makes them appear way too big on screen. Many software programs exist and are downloadable free or at low cost which can help you convert your images to low-res online versions for upload; I prefer The GIMP, myself, but IrfanView is also nice.

That is all; we now return you to your regularly scheduled LiveJournal, already in progress. [/rant]

Comments

[banjoplayinnerd.livejournal.com]

I just tried to use the <img> tag to resize a picture, but it couldn't get it to work. I've been resizing pictures in GIMP but not everyone has the time or inclination to download a software program and learn how to do even something as rudimentary as resize a picture.

Which is not to say you should just post humungous pictures; seems to me there should be a web service that would let you feed in the path to a picture on your machine, spin a few dials, and rotate and/or resize your picture for you. In fact that would be a very nice addition to something like Flikr's feature set -- "rotate this picture," "resize this picture," etc.

[mdlbear]

Using the <img> tag to resize images doesn't work in all browsers, and in any case doesn't reduce the amount of data that has to be downloaded. Far better to resize the image on the server.

A lot of people use flikr and similar services because they make it easy to serve a reduced image while preserving a link to the full-sized version.

[kayshapero]

Personally I just run the image through NeoPaint and reduce it to a reasonable size (usually 400 x 300 for the average photo) then post that image instead of the original. With a link to the full size version if that seems appropriate.

I created the icon for this post the same way, just reducing it to 100 x 100.

Then again, I don't use Flickr so I don't know how it works; I just keep all my images on my own website in the image file.

[sdelmonte]

Fiven my bandwidth troubles at work, I thank you for both urging this sort of behavior, and offering suggestions to make it happen.

[sdelmonte]

Er, That should read "Given..."

[thatcrazycajun.livejournal.com]

You're welcome. Aside from the PITA oversized images put in my LJ reading, I deal with resolution and image size of digital photos—for both print and online use—every day as part of my profession, so this is an area I know something about...which makes it that much more irritating to me when I see others obviously in need of the clue.

[barondave.livejournal.com]

I always cropped & edited my pictures down to 80 or even 40K, with a width of 8" (a printed page and good with most monitors). Even then a very few complained. So I gave up and just did it the way I thought looked best. Now, I use the LJ scrapbook, which automatically makes medium sized thumbnails, clickable to the larger image (still 8" wide).

Photoshop does this well (stripping out an extra bit), though almost any image editing program can handle resizing.

[technoshaman.livejournal.com]

FWIW, my friend raine_wynd pointed me at a program called Paint.net, which, if you have .net on your PC, is a very light program that's in the same league as Ph*t*sh*p and The GIMP. It loads in a *hurry* and isn't nearly as piggy as either of the other two programs... I haven't messed with it on my netbook yet, but I thought it was worth mentioning as a lighter alternative for such things...

[lemmozine.livejournal.com]

Having been recently guilty of this, my apologies. It was my first time trying to post photos, and I had absolutely no clue. HTML is, to me, like a pig-latin version of sanskrit using chinese characters, in black type on a black background.

I will be more careful next time.