I've had a bit of spare time to go surfing through some other sections and older posts recently, and I noticed how many posts are missing their photos.

People need to realise that if their pictures are larger than 50kb, they will be deleted. Sure they might be there for a week or so, but eventually they will disappear. This often makes the post somewhat confusing, especially when the original post said basically 'Check this out' with a picture that no longer exists!

Please keep your attached pictures under 50kb, unless you are hosting them yourself on an outside host.

To check whether your picture is under 50kb, find it using windows explorer and right click on the file and choose 'Properties', where it will tell you the size of the picture. If it is under 50kb you can use it as-is. Otherwise, you will need to resize it.

For those lucky people using Windows XP, there is an 'Image Resizer' Power Tool available from the Microsoft Website here

For those of you who don't, you will need some form of picture editing tool, such as PaintShop Pro, Photoshop, CorelDraw, etc. These programs all have the ability to resize an image, but each one is different so you may need to read the help files.

You can only post images < 50 kb now, and all images bigger than that (+ some to avoid a few popular images going west) have been deleted.

Resizing images is easy.

In Windows XP, it's built in - right click an image -> Resize. For people still on Win98 and ME or Win2K, try using Irfanview if you have nothing else.

http://www.irfanview.com 

On NetBSD/Linux/FreeBSD, use the gimp or what I use, a great tool called mogrify, a portion of the ImageMagick suite.

On MacOS, I have no idea at the moment. I'd be surprised if MacOS X didn't have some form of image resizer.

Andrew

Yeah, Macs have it built-in - who do you think M$ copied the XP bit off? Actually, it's been built in for at least 6 years. I've been using gimp for a while now, 'cos it's there, but I'm starting to think they'll never actually finish it (in current form - it was great about 8 years ago...) Might have to look at your ImageMagick idea.

[edit]

Sorry, should have put some useful stuff in - to reduce the filesize of any reasonably-sized pic in most imaging applications: Go File, Save As, set file type to JPG (or JPEG,) set image quality to 70% (you won't notice the difference, usually) and save. If you have an option for resolution, set it to 72DPI (native web resolution.) Plus, anything bigger than about 640x480 pixels is going to cause problems for some users and isn't really useful on a forum like this.

[Edited on 3-4-2003 by 70AutoStik]

I've had pics of exactly 50kb & less go missing.

borderline ?

I can guarantee that I've only deleted images with filesize > 75000 bytes. I check this using a "select * from ..." SQL statement prior to using the "delete from ..." SQL statement to confirm my results.

But there is a major difference between deletion and the inability to post new images. If there's something up with new posting, please let me know.

Andrew