Please resize your images...

[Boracay]

Can I put in a plea for all members to resize their images before attaching them.
350k+ images take forever to load on my dial up connection, if they load at all. They could be resized to around 50k with no loss of message.
We should all be aware that the Forum server can be marginal at times and having every member upload huge image files is not going to improve it.
Resizing takes only a few seconds using a Microsoft Powertoys Utility.
Of course if the debate is about a Photoshoped(?) image I will understand.

[Alan Wheeler]

Chris are you refering to the Gallery or when a photo is inserted in a post?

[Boracay]

I'm referring mainly to inserted images, though having images in the gallery of an appropriate size would mean I could browse the gallery as well.

[Sonny]

Chris,
I checked out the Power toys utility. Since I am a novice at this, which shoould I download from here.

[David_Old_Jersey]

I tend to post a few pictures now and again, but usually just link to an image already in another website (hotlinking??), so don't get the chance to resize............

[hellosailor]

Chris, web forums tend to be image-rich and hard to deal with on dial-up. I go into the browser settings and disable images (and multimedia<G>) when I have to deal with them. Every browser has that option.

[Sunspot Baby]

Dial up and images don't mix.

George

[Boracay]

Sonny
Just click on ImageResizer.exe and download it into a convenient location, following the instructions.
To resize just right click on the image and select the smallest option. I find it a good idea to rename the resized image.
Sunspot Baby,hellosailor and David_Old_Jersey
Small images download just fine on dial up. However with large images it all just hangs there, I'm not sure why.
To me its an issue like correct spelling or proper links, it makes things easier for everyone. Many members would still use dial up.

[Starbuck]

Chris,

This is said with no animosity at all:

Seems the problem is on your end. Instead of desiring to alter everyone else's behavior to suit you, I suggest you either get a faster connection or reconcile yourself to the performance you have.

Fair Winds,
Jeff

[hellosailor]

Chris-
"Small images download just fine on dial up."
Yes, they do. And ten years ago, an entire web page was expected to be less than 30-40KB in size in order to download in under 30 seconds, the time at which most users will simply go away.

"However with large images it all just hangs there, I'm not sure why."
Dialup users still need pages under 30KB in size and 28kbps is still common for dialup. In some areas, AOL dialup has actually dropped to 3K on 56K lines, so 28kbps is more than many users will see. In the US, ISPs are terminating maintenance on their dial-up pools, except the ones trawling for the bottom end like Netzero.
Do the math: a low-end digicam is 3megapixels now, and a commodity grade cell phone over one megapixel. So one web page, with one commodity grade picture, totally exceeds the capability of one dial-up line for several minutes. That's just one picture--and web forums often have a half dozen or more per page.

I'm not arguing for or against, right or wrong. Just saying times have changed, the web has changed, and dial-up users have to face the reality of either disabling the glitzy stuff, or getting in line and waiting patiently for it while making breakfast and reading the mail. I suppose a really smart web server would interrogate the client and downsample the graphics to accomodate lower bandwidth clients...but computers aren't that smart yet.

[coot]

Originally Posted by CaptainJeff

Seems the problem is on your end. Instead of desiring to alter everyone else's behavior to suit you, I suggest you either get a faster connection or reconcile yourself to the performance you have.

I have broadband, and I also wish people would refrain from posting huge images.

It used to be the custom on the "net" to limit the size of your messages as a courtesy to the recipients. That changed a lot with the big influx of new users in the early 1990's, when the old culture was swamped by newcomers. It still seems a polite thing to do.

[hellosailor]

Hey, coot!<G>
"It used to be the custom on the "net" ...That changed a lot with the big influx of new users in the early 1990's,"

And where exactly did who get public access to the internet BEFORE the early 90s?<G> Heck, in '95 you still had to BUY NetScape, and most businesses were saying "A web site? And what do you do with that?"

[coot]

Originally Posted by hellosailor

And where exactly did who get public access to the internet BEFORE the early 90s?<G> Heck, in '95 you still had to BUY NetScape, and most businesses were saying "A web site? And what do you do with that?"

This turned out to be a little longer than I expected, it's written now, so here's a bit of history:

In the 1970's, most computer networks were private systems for a particular organization. By the early 1980's, many networks appeared that would establish the foundations for the internet that we have today. There was not a lot of "public access", but there were a lot of people using the networks.

USENET was a loosely organized network that passed messages from machine to machine. To join USENET, all you needed to do was find somebody on USENET who was willing to pass messages for you. (In 1987 or so, UUNET was created to provide USENET access to anybody for a fee.) In the beginning, this was usually by dial-up modem from one machine to the next. The principal applications were email and netnews. Netnews is a distributed discussion group. A web forum is kind of like netnews, though there are features in netnews that I have never seen in any web forum.

It was polite to keep messages short because your message might be transferred over several long-distance phone calls, depending where it was going. In 1987 or so, UUNET was created to provide USENET access to anybody.

I used USENET when I was in school. Later, I had USENET via dialup in my house sometime in the late 1980's, then again through UUNET in the early 1990s. I eventually dropped it when I got a job that required high speed internet in my house in 1997.

BITNET was a worldwide network of research organizations. It was based on IBM networking protocols and it seems to me that most connected machines were IBM mainframes.

ARPANET was a research project of the US military, so you had to be connected to the military, a contractor, or a university to get access. ARPANET got a major upgrade to use new protocols on January 1, 1983, and we are still using those protocols as the basis of the internet. As other IP networks were created, they arranged to pass traffic to each other. "The Internet" is the set of all those networks.

PHONENET was a dial-up network created for universities that did not qualify for direct access to the ARPANET, but who still wanted email. PHONENET was designed from the beginning to pass messages transparently with ARPANET.

FIDONET was a computer bulletin board system (BBS). You would call a local FIDONET machine to pose messages for other users. Messages that were going to some other machine were passed to other FIDONET machines over phone lines. Where USENET was usually a feature added on to a multi-user computer, FIDONET was the kind of thing that somebody would dedicate a PC to and run in their basement as a hobby.

Otherwise, there were several commercial services that were intended primarily as closed systems, but that could pass messages to other networks. These include AOL, Prodigy, GEnie, and Compuserve.

People created various hacks to pass messages between the different networks, so eventually it was possible to pass messages from any of these networks to any other network. Between all these networks, the online community was quite substantial through the 1980s, though only a tiny fraction of what we have today.

So, say it's 1989 and you want net access. Your choices are finding somebody who will give you a USENET feed (i.e. anybody who already has one), buying a feed from UUNET, using a FIDONET node, using one of the commercial services, or getting a job someplace that has net access. None of it offers anything like a web browser because it has not been invented yet, but you have email and distributed discussion groups.

Those were the good old days when we had to walk 10 miles to school in snow 8 feet deep and it was uphill both ways, but it had it's up side. Spam (the electronic kind, not the food) was not invented until 1994...

[hellosailor]

Mark, must just be that I haven't heard it in that context. I used the old Compuserve when it was, arguably, more of a network than the internet. But we'd never consider it part of the internet--it was all private. And ARPANET, well, to me that was the private DoD/scholastic net, again not the "internet" as I think of it. FIDONET! Heck no, not the internet, those guys mainly used dial-up connections, and passed traffic to each other in dial-up batch modes.<G>

I've seen definitions of the internet that take it all the way back to ARPANET but, to my way of thinking, ARPANET was a precursor or progenitor, and it wasn't "the internet" as such until people could actually sign up for an account--without being or knowing anyone special--and commercial web sites and messaging could pass on it. Which of course ARPANET never allowed.

Come a long way since the old VT-100 terminals, huh?<G>

[knottybuoyz]

I've still got a Hayes SupraModem 1200 baud for sale!

I sent/received my first electronic message in 1979 if you can believe that. We wrote a program in "Waterloo Basic" to pass e-messages between terminals. If I remember correctly we stored our code on 128 kb 8" floppies. Aperature cards and tape were a thing of the past!