News:

"The phone is a remarkably complex, simple device,
and very rarely ever needs repairs, once you fix them." - Dan/Panther

Main Menu

Storage Space - Photos

Started by Dennis Markham, April 13, 2009, 09:11:13 PM

Previous topic - Next topic

Dennis Markham

I have been made aware of a problem regarding the uploading of photos.  It appears the storage space for the forum has reached it maximum.  I am looking into this.

Meanwhile, if you want to upload photos, I recommend using another photo site, such as Flickr or Photo Bucket and then just posting the link.  There's plenty of bandwidth here but the storage space may need to be increased or we may have to change the way we do business with regard to uploading photos.

Dennis

Dan

Dennis, i just used photobucket the first time to show my whitening (peroxide) results. Hopefully this is what you mean.Check the link, under telephone troubleshooting and repair thanks
"Imagine how weird telephones would look if our ears weren't so close to our mouths." - Steven Wright

AET

Photobucket has always worked good for me, and is a great way to insert photos into your post!
- Tom

Dennis Markham

My son is very active on the car forums and tells me they do not allow for uploading of photos as it uses up so much space.  He says Photobucket is the best...for whatever reason.  I'm "reaching out" for help on the storage issue.  For now if we can use things like Photobucket that will help.  Also I think even though the size was restricted to 900 X 600 or something, maybe if we do smaller sized photos it will help too.

Dan/Panther

Everyone please remember if you use off site photo hosting, and that host goes belly up, all of your photos posted to the forum will be lost, so keep that in mind, and at least use a well established host and not Johhny Fly By Night photo hosting.
I would suggest that photo for use in the Technical section should not be posted off site. Most of the technical library would be worthless without photos.
D/P

The More People I meet, The More I Love, and MISS My Dog.  Dan Robinson

BDM

Another issue with photobucket is many work ISPs will not allow access :-[
--Brian--

St Clair Shores, MI

Dan/Panther

I do understand we have a limited amount of space, but it's no secret I'm dead set against using outside photo hosting, and have gone around and around on ARF for the past 3 years about it. Someday we will be much bigger than what we are now, and may be able to expand our storage. For now, Dennis I suggest that we cut back and limit each post to say 2 photos or 4 photos instead of the 8 we are allowed now, and also make it size limited. Some people post photos, that aren't compressed and that takes a lot of space, one uncompressed photo, can take up as much space as 5 or 6 compressed photos.
Compress your photos always people. Limit the size to 800X600, or 640X480
D/P

The More People I meet, The More I Love, and MISS My Dog.  Dan Robinson

Dan/Panther

Dennis;
I recently read where you, or someone said after 90 days old posts drop off. I was going back deleteing photos I'd posted, that I didn't feel added anything, and I noticed that some posts go back to October. Maybe we need to go through and look at some of these, and move the important ones to technical Library, and delete the rest.
Dan

The More People I meet, The More I Love, and MISS My Dog.  Dan Robinson

Dennis Markham

Dan, thanks for the advice.  I agree, I don't want to use off-site storage I just was putting that out there for temporary use while I get this squared away.    I have already looked into the software of this "simple machine" program for the forum and did adjust the amount of photos to upload from 8 to 6.  But I think I will change that again to 4.  If someone has more than 4 photos for a posting, one can just make another "reply" and post a couple more.  I have posted 8 at once myself in the past.  I will also set a size limit smaller than it is currently.  But it will still fill up again.

Also I am going to contact the server and see what it will take (cost-wise) to increase space.  Eventually it will have to continue to be increased. 

Actually the current program calls for auto-delete after 30 days unless a topic is "stickied".  So if there are still some from as long as ago as October, the it may not be auto deleting them.

It will be a huge task to constantly manually prune each "board" unless the moderators use their judgement and sticky what they think should be kept and delete the rest.

I'm working on this issue..................

Bill

Dennis -

If I include a photo in my post, and then my friend Freddie hits "Quote" to make his reply, then my photo appears again when his reply is viewed. Do you know if the second copy of the photo is stored separately from the first, thus taking up twice as much storage space? If so, I would strongly encourage everyone to refrain from sloppy and inconsiderate use of the Quote button. The doubled photo already makes things tough for anyone on dial-up, but if it also contributes to filling up the storage space of the board, someone ought to yell.

There. Having yelled, I feel much better.

Bill

bingster

#10
On forums which use only outside photo hosting, quoting will duplicate the photo along with the text.  With this forum setup, though, the photo remains separate, and quoting doesn't duplicate the photo--only the text.

Just a word about outside photo hosting:  On my old radio show forum, I (and most other members) have always used photobucket, and after nearly four years, it's been perfect.  That's no guarantee for the future of course, but with a large site like that, the risk of failure is fairly low.  A plus for using such a service is that you can embed photos within your text, instead of having them show up only at the very end of a post.
= DARRIN =



HobieSport

Dennis et. al.,

Thanks for working on this.  Since I love posting pictures, and in the past I have posted a lot of off topic pictures, I will do my part by refraining from posting pics unless they are necessary, and will use Photobucket unless they are technical.

Another thing I could do is go back and delete quite a few of my pictures, for example, pictures of my trailer (not really phone oriented) and my long thread with pictures about "old phones in movies", etc..

It would make those threads have some missing parts in them, and maybe confusing, since of course I can only delete my own posts, but I'm quite willing to do that if requested, for the general good of the forum.

Let me know. :)  -Matt

Bill

#12
Quote from: Dan/Panther on April 14, 2009, 12:39:31 AM
Some people post photos, that aren't compressed and that takes a lot of space, one uncompressed photo, can take up as much space as 5 or 6 compressed photos.
Compress your photos always people. Limit the size to 800X600, or 640X480
D/P
Agreed! Microsoft has a neat little tool for Windows that makes compression trivially easy. It is called Image Resizer - get it at www.microsoft.com/windowsxp/downloads/powertoys/xppowertoys.mspx. Once installed, you simply put your cursor on the image file (not the image itself) and right-click. One of the options on the resulting menu is Resize Image. Select "SMALL 640x480", and click again. It resizes the image and stores a copy in the same place as the original, with the word "Small" added to the name.

It is amazingly effective. It will usually take a 3 megabyte image file from my camera and turn it into a 20 kilobyte file, depending on the amount of detail in the original file. And with no obvious lack of detail. Don't know how it works, but it works WELL. It is a great solution for the problem Dennis is facing.

As an example, my photos in this thread http://www.classicrotaryphones.com/forum/index.php?topic=584.15 are all between 20KB and 50KB, and I think they look pretty good. I have trouble distinguishing between them and the original 3 MB files that came out of my camera.

Bill

Dennis Markham

#13
We should be back in business.  The server had plenty of space.  The problem was with settings in the Simple Machines software (this forum software).  I had to call out the big gun---Mr. Mark Stevens who made an adjustment and educated me on the change.

Eventually I would imagine there will be a server space issue but it will be a while.

As a result of this however, there have been some great ideas.  Dan, your resizing method is a good one and I'm going to give that a shot.  I have always used a couple different resizing programs and always resize my photos before uploading them but I still probably have been making them too large.  I'm going to take an image and upload several versions of it to demonstrate the difference or lack of.  Thank you for your input on this.

Hobie, there is no need for you to go back and delete your photos.  We have plenty of space.  I think though that it does make us all aware of conservation but we don't want to change our habits of communicating and using photos to do so.  Maybe we can all get into the habit of using, say Photobucket to post photos of things we don't really care about if they disappear.  Like movie clips, etc.  And as Bingster pointed out I do like the idea of working the photo into the text, rather than having to go to the bottom of the post to view the photo.  I'm going to try and use Photobucket at times like those.  I created an account last night when this started so I'll see how it goes.  It does require a couple of more procedural steps when using those off-site programs for photos.  I also took the link that Photobucket provided and used TinyURL to shorten the link which also removed some personal information from the link provided by Photobucket.

Meanwhile I am going to verify my changes to the upload limit of 6 photos per post.  Feel free to upload more but you will have to just end your post and open another to post additional postings.  

After I post several shots of the same image using various sizes, I'll make a determination as to the size limit of uploads.

I think that covers it.  Thanks to everyone that contributed to this "problem" which really isn't much of a problem after all.  

Special thanks to Mark Stevens who I got out of retirement to come help us with this.  Some day when I get the training wheels off we won't have to bother him but it was good to communicate with him again.

Dennis Markham

#14
I think the best size will be the 640X480.  Here are three examples.

1:  320 X 240

2:  640 X 480

3:  800 (Maintain Aspect Ratio)

Based upon these results the 640 X 480 really don't look much different than the larger photos.  So I will adjust the settings to limit the photo size to 640 X 480. 

The software does resize the photo to as close to 640 X 480.  So even if one attempts to upload a HUGE photo the program will resize it to the specifications that I indicated in the software. 

And now.........back to our regular programming.

Dennis