Just some thoughts on image compressionhopefully no-one will take this as patronising, or for that matter as definitive guidelines, it's just some thoughts.
Firstly, physical size: there's really no need to make things any wider than, say, 400 pixels, and to get on the front they'd have to be 280 max wide anyway. Sometimes bigger is worth it, but it's very rarely going to make much difference to how good something looks on the web- it's not like working with print.
Compression- I don't see any need to have any greater than 60% quality on jpeg compression, and usually lower than that is fine (again- we're only working with a message board here, it's not a design showcase).
Thirdly, on a board like this (and this is the most important point) there can be a lot of individual images. As mentioned before, there seems little need for a file size over 50k most of the time. Again, this is by no means definitive, but certainly multiple images of 250K+ is unnecessary. For the guys on a dial-up, it's a nightmare to get that amount of stuff down the pipe, and hence a major barrier to usability. Linking thumbnails to big images is, as suggested, an excellent way to make large images available without slowing the board to an unusable crawl.
As i say, just some thoughts.
(Firstly, physical size: there's really no need to make things any wider than, say, 400 pixels, and to get on the front they'd have to be 280 max wide anyway. Sometimes bigger is worth it, but it's very rarely going to make much difference to how good something looks on the web- it's not like working with print.
Compression- I don't see any need to have any greater than 60% quality on jpeg compression, and usually lower than that is fine (again- we're only working with a message board here, it's not a design showcase).
Thirdly, on a board like this (and this is the most important point) there can be a lot of individual images. As mentioned before, there seems little need for a file size over 50k most of the time. Again, this is by no means definitive, but certainly multiple images of 250K+ is unnecessary. For the guys on a dial-up, it's a nightmare to get that amount of stuff down the pipe, and hence a major barrier to usability. Linking thumbnails to big images is, as suggested, an excellent way to make large images available without slowing the board to an unusable crawl.
As i say, just some thoughts.
crab_bloke),
Mon 18 Feb 2002, 16:37,
archived)