Hey!
I've been wanting to post this for a while now. Many people don't have high-speed connections or share their connection with many others, so it's a real burden for us to watch your lovely big photos. I know many places allow uploading 20MB photos, but that doesn't mean you should.
For example, my own photos are downsized and rendered at a lower quality before I post them to the internet. I observed that there is no visible difference between a 6MB picture from a 1MB one (JPEG exported from lightroom). So you don't have to worry about losing quality.
Also, there is no need for high resolutions. The pictures are displayed at a resolution of about 720p , so you can drop the resolution to 1080p or similar without worrying. No need for sizes like 3000x2000 or 3264x4928 (in my case, the original sizes).
This means you can choose between dropping your resolution, JPEG rendering quality or doing both.
It's no problem if you only have a few photos, but if there's 5+ photos, things get really slow for me. I have a 10Mbit/s connection. That means I can download at an maximum speed of 10/8=1,25MB per second.
Full - no size limit. Med - 1000 KB size limit. Min - 500 KB size limit.
Spot the difference:
Picture 1
Full (11,2MB)
Med (795KB)
Min (475KB)
Picture 2
Full (8,74 MB)
Med(984 KB)
Min(435 KB)
Picture 3
Full (3,84 MB)
Med (718 KB)
Min (418 KB)
For me there is no observable difference between the full-sized and med-sized pictures although the size difference is 5x to 10x. The smaller ones, which are below 500KB, do show a difference, that's why I recommend uploading pictures around ~1MB.
Hope no one took offence with my post. This is about caring for those with low connection speeds and also speeding up your own uploads. (+all servers will be grateful. Just look at imgsafe.org. We killed it :( There's no need for that. )
*I tagged this post with #steemit because this doesn't only concern #photography , but the whole platform/every post.
**Also, if you find a new post with lots of big pictures that loads very slowly, link this post to them.
Check out my other posts @sulev
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This is a really stupid question probably but I'm an amateur so please forgive me... how do we change the size of our pics? I know mine are probably way to large/high res
easiest way for one image is "MS Paint". There is a resize tool.
If you are using advanced programs like Adobe Lightroom, there are export options which let you dictate the export rules(quality, size, format, colorspace etc).
In Windows I would highly suggest not using the standard MS Paint, and using Paint.NET instead. It's a really good balance of simplicity and standard bread-and-butter photo editing tools, and resizes images in high quality. It allows you to select your JPEG compression when you save an image and gives you a quality and filesize preview.
But if you're using another high quality image editing program like Lightroom and Photoshop, by all means use those. I still will use Paint.NET for simple resizes and JPEG/PNG edits sometimes just because it's so lightweight and simple.
I love Paint.net for resizing and simple photo editing, but it's not very effective in lossless image compression. I recommend using online tools like:
https://compressor.io/compress
http://optimizilla.com/
https://tinypng.com/
(I wrote a guide about this for a client once, so I remember these by heart)
but you don't need lossless for JPG's you upload to sites like these + it takes time to upload them to the online compressor. (It's another matter if you intend to sell prints ofc... but then you are going to use the original file anyway).
But thanks for the links :) It's definitely useful for users who don't have any image processing software at hand.
Good advice. Is there any way this can be done for gifs, can we show gifv instead?
you want a comparison in GIF format? You wont see much of a difference as it is. The best way to observe the difference is if you open all those pictures in a new tab and zoom in, then cycle through the tabs.
Good point. I find that ImgUr does a good job of compressing my high quality photos (while still allowing people to see higher res ones on click). Their mobile app rules too. I use SteemImg sometimes too but the recent DDOS concerns me. Until we have a true blockchain solution for images, ImgUr is probably more reliable.
Perhaps this is for my posts? I did not attach any importance to this aspect. I thought that in the 21st century, the Internet fast for most users. Now I will reduce the size of images
15 years ago having a 10mbit connection was unheard of. Lots has changed in the 21st century from 2000 to today.
10 to 20mbit might be considered the norm around my area(estonia), but I know it's definitely not the case elsewhere in the world, even the US where internet is provided mostly with hardlimit(download limit). That sucks. Keeping the traffic down for them is vital.
Never new that. I my little town I have 300mbps Internet without download limits at home. I'm lucky!
:D A 300mbit connection is High-end Light-cable connection for consumers. I bet it costs much.
I had a 100mbit connection not long ago, but paying 30€ a month seemed too much. Now I have 10mbit, but pay about 12€. There's really no need for the extra speed 99% of the time.
It costs 510 rubles in my city. It is about 8 USD
wow, but then again you are in Russia. Things are very different, considering what you can get for money.
I was in Hawaii in 2015. I don't know the broadband speeds, but I bought a SIM card which gave me 2GB of internet a month. It cost me 60$!!! Crazy! Yet it was considered the norm. You can imagine my amazement. Right now I have unlimited 2mbit internet on my phone and pay 6€ a month.
I'm in an area with really crappy internet and I have to share it with hundreds, so this is much appreciated!
I have been using http://www.jpegreducer.com/index.html to lower my own pictures in my posts. I hope more people do this.
But why use bandwidth on uploading and downloading? Just download a program** that does it for you. Result = low sized pictures = fast upload.
**I mean, get a program that resizes or changes quality.
Thank you for this post. I am new to Steemit and was wondering about pixel width and file sizes. One question - when I create a post on Steemit, would you recommend uploading it directly, or uploading to my own web server and then linking to it? Thank you in advance for your response.
up to you, whether you want your photos to be on the web forever or just on your webserver
Thanks!