dial up users - need your input

[back alley]

lately there have been a few people who have been circumventing the use of thumbnail photos in their posts and posting LARGE pics.

i am assuming that this is a royal pita for dial up users and perhaps others but before i make an issue of this (and start deleting the pics) i want to hear from those possibly affected.

people seemed quite concerned about the use of bandwidth when it came to the gallery pics but this seems to be less so for pics within a post.

i'd like to know wassup.

joe

[SolaresLarrave]

I noted the appearance of a couple of shots in a message... and started wondering how it could be done. It did cause a bit of problem when I saw it, and even in a computer with cable service the thread and the image took a bit to download.

I don't consider myself affected... yet. When you have dial-up, however, very few things load well and quickly, though...

Thanks for your concern! :)

[Terence T]

I'm not on dialup myself but I do get a little annoyed when there are several large images posted in the thread and not in the thumbnails.

Perhaps one way around this is to provide a guideline in regulating the size of pics using the "[img]" tag. Perhaps not more than 640 pixels on its widest side would be a decent resolution to start off with. Or maybe a script could ensure the image guidelines are automatically adhered to.

[DougK]

I'm on DSL and I still prefer having thumbnails as opposed to full images in threads. That said, I think it's an easy mistake to make and no harm meant so I would think a friendly, global "how to" reminder should suffice.

[back alley]

i'm always friendly, ain't i? :)

joe

[richard_l]

It's very kind of you to consider us dialups. I would appreciate it if you could try somehow to promote the use of thumbnails rather than fullsize images in the posts. Maybe the software could be tweaked so that the IMG tag doesn't work.

[Terence T]

It's not practical to disallow the use of the [img] tag as there might be instances where hotlinking an image from another server might be required (for copyright reasons or whatever). Limiting the size and number per post might prove to be a better option.

[nwcanonman]

"Solares said - Do you like my new avatar?"
.................................
Looks like a beautiful cat. Is he yours? Great light ~; - )

[richard_l]

It's not practical to disallow the use of the [img] tag as there might be instances where hotlinking an image from another server might be required (for copyright reasons or whatever). Limiting the size and number per post might prove to be a better option.Wouldn't just a URL to the image file usually be sufficient?

[24x30]

From home I'm a dialin user, there I just stop loading a page which isn't finished after about 10 seconds. I prefer the thumbnails, they're fast enough.

From my office the bottelneck isn't the connection to the internet :-). And normally I don't load flush pages on neither connection.

/rudi

[Doug]

I have a fast connection and a large monitor, but it's still inconvenient when a post has an image so large I have to scroll around to see the parts of it. I usually then just download the image and edit it smaller so I can see the whole thing at once. So for this reason a size limit for post images sounds good.

[richard_l]

Well, I guess the majority rules. I learned HTML and coded my web sites so they would be accessible to just about anybody with any browser or connection speed. That doesn't seem to be the trend nowadays. So be it. Onwards and upwards! This way is easier. :rolleyes:

Richard

[Poptart]

Just put a size limit into the TOS and then admins can delete anything too large. Problem solved!

[Socke]

Hm, I have 1MBit/s upstream at home and 10MBit/s at work, so I often don't realize how big a file is.

On my own homepage I usualy have the pictures at 1000x1500 and 60% compression, sometimes up to 1200x1800 at 80% but my website creates its own thumbnails.

When I'm on dialup, very seldom nowadays, then I just block image loading in firefox and open the images I think may be interesting.

[Brian Sweeney]

You can also go to user control panel, options, and undo the "Show Images" option. It will stop display of img tags, and thumbnails. You can click on the icon shown in the place of the thombnail to view the image. Size is shown, so you know what you are getting into.

[taffer]

For a while I was forced to use dial-up when my DSL provider messed up with the config, and being completely honest, many times I wished RFF would have a 'reduced' version a la photo.net, mainly plain html. OTH, maybe RFF has that feature and I haven't located it yet :confused:

So I can clearly understand how frustrating it must be sometimes to wait for a page to load, and wait and wait...

[Kat]

I use dialup, I agree that a size limit should solve the problem. i don't mind that a pic is not in thumbnail form, just as long as it's not too big, either. Maybe max of 640 or 480 below?

I was wondering when i was attaching a pic before in a thumbnail--wouldn't this take up space in the site compared to using [img]?

[Brian Sweeney]

If you set the image display off in the user profile options, the links to the image are displayed. You have to click on the link to get the image, rather than it be expanded automatically. Thumbnailes are not displayed. Avatars are displayed, and the pifcture of the week is displayed. These should hit Cache readily, and not be too slow. The page does come up faster, especially when RFF is on the slow side.

[peter_n]

I would like to see just thumbnails in the threads, and I'm on cable broadband at home and a T1 at work. I can't imagine what its like for a dialup.

[jlw]

I thought there WAS a limit -- 550 pixels or something like that. I have been conscientiously downsizing my images to that limit.

Maybe the people who have been posting the x-large links (I've seen some of them) just aren't aware that they're causing a problem.

I don't especially like the distraction of clicking thumbnails, and often an image makes more sense when you can include it within the flow of text -- but even though I've got broadband, I agree that images large enough to need scrolling are a big nuisance.

[FrankS]

Thumbnails in posts please! Although, could they be made just a bit bigger so one can evaluate the image more easily to determine whether to bother seeing a full size view?

[richard_l]

If you set the image display off in the user profile options, the links to the image are displayed.Thanks, Brian. That's a good suggestion.

However, here we are, a bunch of rangefinder fanatics mostly using manual equipment, and some of us find it too much of a bother to click on a thumbnail? :confused:

[peter_n]

Yes but I think the vast majority here are perfectly happy with thumbnails.

[FrankS]

Perfectly happy with thumbnails! If you can, please disable the option to post full size pics, the reason is not to be authoritarian and controlling, but to keep loading speeds reasonable.

[ddutchison]

It sure is nice to hear that people still consider the feelings of us dial-up users. I've had image-viewing disabled for so long that I'd forgotten it was an option.

In the best of all possible worlds, I'd love it if the discussion forums contained only thumbnails that linked directly to the full-sized images (if that's what the poster wanted). I don't know if the board software could do that, but it would be a lot more informative than "you_name_it.jpg... 275k". As a dial-up user, I find that 20k-25k images load pretty fast, and a 300 pixel limit in size is big enough to see what an image is about. The example below is colour, 20k, 300x300px., 20% compression.


It'd be simpler to just limit size, and i think the standard used at photo.net (511px, 100k max IIRC) is a reasonable compromise. A photo laden thread on photo.net is also pretty slow on dial-up, but here we have the option of limiting the number of posts displayed per page, so we don't have to wait for all 70 images to load.

Anyway, thanks for thinking about it, here's my sample thumbnail..

[SolaresLarrave]

Glad you liked Ben, NWCanonman! :)

I photographed him (the cat, that is, Ben) in the spring of 2005. The light was beautiful, he was standing outside of our enclosed porche, asking discreetly to be let in, and my Leica with Summicron 90 was nearby, so guess what happened! :)

This was the best of that series. Again, glad you liked it!

See now what others miss when they turn off the image viewing option? :D

[kiev4a]

Thumbnauls and photo size limits make sense even though I recently switched from dial-up to DSL. P.nets 500 pix wide is sufficient, as far as I'm concerned. It might also help control the folks who take up a lot of server space by apparently using the gallery for storage.

[dmr]

One of the machines at home (not the one I'm on now) is still dial-up, and when I'm on the road I'm dial-up most of the time.

I prefer the thumbnails, and I do like the way the images are uploaded and thumbnailed here. The full-size ones seem to be so few and far between (at least in the threads I tend to read) that I've never been annoyed by it.

I really have very few complaints about this system or the habits of the members here. :)

[Penguin_101]

I don't especially like the distraction of clicking thumbnails, and often an image makes more sense when you can include it within the flow of text
I agree, I rarely click thumbnails to open pictures.