The primary reason we limit the size is when you post a un-edited, full size pic, everyone that wants to view that thread is forced to download all the pics in it. Given some of us are still on dial-up, it's courteous to reduce posted pics to about 72-180 pixels/inch and no more than 8x10" (for a forum this is still huge).
The un-edited picture from your camera is about four megabytes in size, even if you have even an elcheapo one like mine. This may not sound like much, but if there were the maximum allowed five pics per post - every 28 posts would just about equal downloading an entire music CD (actually store bought albums usually have far less than that - but that's another topic). So you see how this would destroy some people's browsing experience - forcing them to turn off images and defeating the purpose of providing pictures in the first place.
The image I'll be using as an example directly off the memory card and not touched in any way is;
Width: 3648 pixels
Height: 2736 pixels
Resolution: 180 pixels/inch
3.67 MB (3,849,876 bytes)
Resized to a comfy "medium" that same pic is now;
Width: 320 pixels
Height: 180 pixels
Resolution: 180 pixels/inch
53.1 KB (54,375 bytes)
I didn't add in how many inches this equals because that depends on your screen resolution and size - but most websites display 72 pixels/inch, so anything above that will effect displayed size and is usually a waste of time as we really don't need to be able to see every last pore, blemish and zit.
There are a bunch of easy solutions to this that don't involve installing any software or even learning the basics of photo editing. One such solution is Photobucket, a feature rich image hosting service that also now includes video. You can of course skip the rest of this post and go right to Photobucket Tutorials for the basics if you wish.
First, register for a free Photobucket account. Once that's completed, there are a bunch of options for making albums, setting privacy levels, and other goodies - but we'll skip all that and jump right to the good stuff - uploading, resizing, and posting pics and thumbnails.
There's a nice, big, blue button with "Upload images & videos" on it...
Pretty self-explanatory, just click it and it will bring you to this screen;
Just dig around till you find where your pic is stored on your computer, in this case I'm uploading directly from my camera's memory card, placed in the card reader of my computer. You of course may have your pics stored in other places. As you can see in the above pic - there's a bunch of options, you can get pics from other websites, phones - just about anywhere.
You can also upload mutable images and videos simultaneously by single-clicking one and going to the last one in the list, pressing the shift key, holding it down and single-clicking that last image. You can deselect single images or scattered ones that you do want by using the ctrl key instead of shift.
Now that you've got your pic(s) selected, just click the "open" button at the bottom right of the screen and it will bring you to this;
Depending on the number and size if the images your uploading and your available bandwidth, this could take a while - videos in particular you might want to be prepaired to wait a good long time. I tend to use Adobe Photoshop to resize my pictures beforehand to reduce this wait time - but if that was an available option for you - you'd probably not be reading this.
Once it's finished uploading it will bring you to this screen;
You can choose to fill in the blanks to the right, I never bother as everything I need to say will be in the post I'm puting the image in. Still - if you use the "public album" feature it would be nice to explain what people are looking at. Once your done, just click "return to album" and it'll bring you to this;
The un-edited picture from your camera is about four megabytes in size, even if you have even an elcheapo one like mine. This may not sound like much, but if there were the maximum allowed five pics per post - every 28 posts would just about equal downloading an entire music CD (actually store bought albums usually have far less than that - but that's another topic). So you see how this would destroy some people's browsing experience - forcing them to turn off images and defeating the purpose of providing pictures in the first place.
The image I'll be using as an example directly off the memory card and not touched in any way is;
Width: 3648 pixels
Height: 2736 pixels
Resolution: 180 pixels/inch
3.67 MB (3,849,876 bytes)
Resized to a comfy "medium" that same pic is now;
Width: 320 pixels
Height: 180 pixels
Resolution: 180 pixels/inch
53.1 KB (54,375 bytes)
I didn't add in how many inches this equals because that depends on your screen resolution and size - but most websites display 72 pixels/inch, so anything above that will effect displayed size and is usually a waste of time as we really don't need to be able to see every last pore, blemish and zit.
There are a bunch of easy solutions to this that don't involve installing any software or even learning the basics of photo editing. One such solution is Photobucket, a feature rich image hosting service that also now includes video. You can of course skip the rest of this post and go right to Photobucket Tutorials for the basics if you wish.
First, register for a free Photobucket account. Once that's completed, there are a bunch of options for making albums, setting privacy levels, and other goodies - but we'll skip all that and jump right to the good stuff - uploading, resizing, and posting pics and thumbnails.
There's a nice, big, blue button with "Upload images & videos" on it...
Pretty self-explanatory, just click it and it will bring you to this screen;
Just dig around till you find where your pic is stored on your computer, in this case I'm uploading directly from my camera's memory card, placed in the card reader of my computer. You of course may have your pics stored in other places. As you can see in the above pic - there's a bunch of options, you can get pics from other websites, phones - just about anywhere.
You can also upload mutable images and videos simultaneously by single-clicking one and going to the last one in the list, pressing the shift key, holding it down and single-clicking that last image. You can deselect single images or scattered ones that you do want by using the ctrl key instead of shift.
Now that you've got your pic(s) selected, just click the "open" button at the bottom right of the screen and it will bring you to this;
Depending on the number and size if the images your uploading and your available bandwidth, this could take a while - videos in particular you might want to be prepaired to wait a good long time. I tend to use Adobe Photoshop to resize my pictures beforehand to reduce this wait time - but if that was an available option for you - you'd probably not be reading this.
Once it's finished uploading it will bring you to this screen;
You can choose to fill in the blanks to the right, I never bother as everything I need to say will be in the post I'm puting the image in. Still - if you use the "public album" feature it would be nice to explain what people are looking at. Once your done, just click "return to album" and it'll bring you to this;
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