posting pictures

[Al_Smith]

Since the rework of the system at first I could post pictures by drag and drop,copy and past etc .just like any other forum .However the last I tried it did not work .To insert it in the area provided  it said the pixel count was too high which at first it did not .What am I doing incorrectly ?

[WV Sawmiller]

   Sounds like you're having the same problems I posted earlier today in the link below.

https://forestryforum.com/board/index.php?topic=124146.0

[Jeff]

Reduce your picture sizes before trying to upload. The Forestry Forum server is no longer going to be allowed to use its resources to resize photos huge photos. Its easy enough to resize a photo to share. Just figure out how to do it on your device. I can't begin to know how, an every different scenario.

[Al_Smith]

Thanks for the reply .I'm going to have to  figure out how to do it .Problem is if  it has mechanical items I handle it with ease .However I get all messed up attempting to understand the workings of protocall on computor programs .In other words I'm nearly a computer moron .

[KEC]

Al Smith, you're not alone. It seems like there is a prevailing presumption that everyone was born knowing  how to do stuff on the computer. I was blundering along trying to put photos on the FF gallery when I saw this thread.

[Ianab]

Al, it's not that much different to fault finding a mechanical problem. That too can be daunting if you don't understand the basics, or even the terminology being used.

For starters, what "computer" are you using? Smartphones / tablets etc are all just different styles of computer, before you get into the different software they are running. Like you are going to fault find a diesel Toyota different to a gas Chevy.  Both are going to work, but they aren't identical under the hood. 

Then I'll try and cover some of  the "techie" stuff. Hopefully I'm able to explain it. 

There are 2 factors in the size of an image. One is the number of "dots" (pixels). That's the individual points of light on the screen. My monitor here can display 1920 x 1024 individual dots, or nearly 2 million pixels. (other folks may have more, or less)  If a picture is bigger than that, the software "shrinks" it to fit on the screen. So an image from my phone is 4,000 x 3,000. That's 4x the area it need to be displayed. Great if you want to print it on a wall poster, total overkill for a web page. Your web browser scales the image down to fit, and ignores much of the detail, but you can't tell. 

Next thing is "Compression". That image from my cheap smartphone is 12 Million pixels, and in theory that would take about 36 million bytes (characters) to represent, as it came from the camera sensor. Much of that info is duplicated, or very similar for each dot. So there is a compression system that tries to maintain most of the detail, while shrinking the file size. But it has limitations, and the uncompressed file that's displayed will always lack some of the details. You can adjust the settings to compress as much as you want, but after a certain point the image turns to mud. There is just too little detail left. But the default on my phone takes that 36 million down to about 6 million, and still looks sharp as. 

Now the gallery used to be set so that a ~6 mb image that was 4,000 pixels across, got shrunk and compressed, so it was maybe 1,000 pix, and only 0.5 million bytes. But that's a task the server had to do, and it takes time / memory to do it, plus the bandwidth to upload the large file in the first place. So now it's up to the user to resize / compress, and send up a sensible sized image. 

BTW, the files sizes I'm talking from the phone are "basic". Lil's new phone can do 50 or even 100 million pixels in one mode, so you can see how things could get out of hand. 

[Rhodemont]

I added a pic to my gallery last week to finally include an avatar in my profile.  It loaded fine but rotated 90 deg in posts.  Just reduced the size and reloaded and now I am standing up straight

[Jeff]

First of all, that is not how you add an avatar. You do it via your profile. Edit your avatar photo before helps, It turns because of the information the camera added to the picture. 

[Magicman]

I posted this somewhere else but as information, I downloaded and use the app;  Image Size.

With it I resize my pictures before I upload them into my laptop.  Works for me.

[Mooseherder]

Resizing made easy for Android phones.  
Edit: Select 20% for uploading to FF.

https://youtu.be/AJ86Qb1zmuM?si=oMPFFZylspu_wV2N

[Old Greenhorn]

Is it me, or did the size limit for photos change? A couple of days ago I could have sworn it was 2Mb per photo, now it seems to be 1Mb. I have to play a little more now to get them in that range, but no big deal, just asking.

[Jeff]

They changed because people were taking advantage of uploading photos that take everybit of the space up and they may change again. The drag and drop does NOT resize. I may stop the use of it. When a big photo only needs to be 150k and someone adds 5 that are 2000K, it does not take that much to realize our server space will be devoured.

The gallery works as it always did, other than you go to it, get your pic, and put it in the post as there is no longer a hacked in add button. Use that.

[Jeff]

Resizing made easy for Android phones.  Select 40% for uploading to FF.

https://youtu.be/AJ86Qb1zmuM?si=oMPFFZylspu_wV2N

20% is big enough usually.

[Old Greenhorn]

OK Jeff, I get the message and have a better understanding now. Thanks.

[beenthere]

I use the software "Paint" that comes loaded with my computer. Easy to resize, add text, or crop the image. Many more features as well: lines, arrows, circles, etc. of any color selected. 

[Jeff]

I dont think paint even is a thing any more.

[beenthere]

Most certainly is "a thing". 
Changed a lot for the better since it's "earlier" years.

Maybe not for the phone users.

[Jeff]

Its still comes on windows?

[Al_Smith]

I opened a can of worms accidently .My question was for a short time I could drag and drop then that option changed .Now that's it's been explained I could use the gallery like I always did prior to the change .However since I haven't had any picture to share .In answer to a question it's on standard desk computer with Win 10 with a huge onboard hard drive plus a gigantic aux hard drive on a lighting fast service .For example I can put a snipe bid on E-bay in about 2 seconds .However it has been interesting conversation if nothing else .

[Jim_Rogers]

I use 3D paint to resize photos. And I use regular paint to add "ID" numbers to photos of tools for sale in my gallery. They both work for me.

Jim Rogers

[Larry]

Data storage and transfer costs Jeff money. Big files are not necessary to post top notch, high quality pictures so huge picture sizes are like burning money for absolutely no reason. I would think any member would have enough consideration for the forum to learn how to post pictures correctly using a minimum of data. Doesn't take long to learn the bare bone basics.

Paint just had a new release a few months ago and yes it still comes with Windows. I don't use it much. Lots of good (and free) programs to process pictures. Normally I use GIMP. My process is to sharpen, correct white balance, crop, resize to 1080 X 1080 pixels (that size also works well on social media), than optimize somewhere around 250 kb. That's a huge step down from the 25 mb picture my Nikon spits out. Probably 95% of recent pictures in my gallery are less than 300 kb. Earlier pics were even smaller due to forum constraints.

[Jeff]

All I can say, is I'm trying to make it as easy as possible, but at this point, aint been nothing easy about any of it for anybody. But, I'll keep tweaking. 

[KEC]

I've been moving along at warp speed on learning to resize photos, but I'm stuck in reverse.

[DHansen]

This thread has opened my eyes about the photo posting and data consumption.  Learning by reading the posts here in this thread.  I will try to pay more attention to the size and number of photos I post in my threads.  Thanks for all the information. 

[Magicman]

But, I'll keep tweaking

Not about pictures but I see that some tweaking has been done with the little orange "New" indicators.  The lettering was darker and turned white giving an indicator that it had been read.  Now it is always white.  ??

[Jeff]

The way it is now is the way it is supposed to be. That colored visited link was an unintended effect of something that was causing a different bug.

There is still stuff cropping up everyday, oh, say like the admins getting systematically banned from the entire server due to what seems an incompatibility with something in simple machines written code that triggered a rule in the server firewall to ban that admins i.p. when they did "something" still unknown.

I tried to relax tonight and go pick up Steve and then watch Jeremy throw at the state dart tournament. Nope. No relaxing. None.

[Jeff]

Uploaded right from phone to gallery. 2.8 mb  on phone.

Finished size 49kb. 

[Magicman]

That colored visited link was an unintended effect of something that was causing a different bug.

OK, the "New" is a feature that I regularly use so I immediately noticed the difference.  We are all learning.  Whatever was one there and now not, we can live without.

[Jeff]

Okay, I'm not understanding.  New posts are still marked new as long as you are logged in. I could incorporate our old yellow new tags in there, but thought I'd stay modern as it seems at least to be adequately marked.

[Magicman]

I have no problem with the New or actually anything.  I just noticed the change yesterday and made a comment.

My only question was that the New wording was darker when unread, and then turned to white after it had been read.  What that gave was an indication whether the "New" had been read or not.  Of course refresh removes the New markers that have been read.

[Ianab]

Just looking at Jeff's picture above, it shows that a decent picture can be relatively small. Pixel wise it's 450 x 800, so looks sensible on the screen, and because the image has a lot of uniform areas of similar colour, it compresses down to pretty small size. (50.7k or .0505 mb) by my reckoning. Either way, not a big deal in terms of server storage and bandwidth. 

Other images may not compress as well. I've found in the past that pictures of trees don't compress well, as they tend to have lots of small details, leaves, twigs, sunlight, shadow etc. Using the same compression settings will result in a larger file than say an image containing a blue drum, a white fridge and brown cabinet. Those large even coloured areas can be compressed into a much smaller file than if they were painted in fine camo detail.  But even then, you might end up with ~100kb, still a very sensible file size. 

Now I see mention of "shrink by X %". If that gets the right size for you, great. But it depends on what size the file started as. Playing with new (but cheap) phone, I can go up to 50 million pixels. That's an 8,000 x 6,000 image, that the phone can compress down to 5-10 mb. WAY overkill for regular screen display, so the default is ~4,000 wide. For a 4.000 pix image, as Jeff suggests, you can shrink to 20%, and be 800 wide. I usually do it though GIMP software, sometimes adjust the image or crop out unneeded parts, and then shrink to 1024 wide, which is "sensible". 

But the % depends on what camera (and settings) you use. If your original image is only 2,000 pixels, you would want to shrink it less. 

Footnote. GIMP is short for "Gnu Image Manipulation Program" and is an open source (free) Photoshop. sort of program. Very powerful image editing, but overkill for just resizing pictures. If all you need is a smaller image, then the phone software or Windows Paint will do the job just fine. I run it because it's free and does everything I need it to, but probably use about 1% of it's functions.