I’m happy to do that, of course. However, for PlayRaws this means that you can’t really judge noise reduction or the generation of halos anymore (makes processing easier 
).
Does the site need more financial support to carry the file storage?
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part of the problem seems to be how people upload the images … some of the threads dont have thumbnails for the files that everyone looking at the threads downloads 33mb in 3 jpegs for just viewing the thread.
Yes, I just checked this post. Originally, I uploaded the image using the corresponding icon and the “thumbnail” had the size of the complete image (~6 MB). When I dragged the same image into the post I got a thumbnail of ~ 0.7 MB.
Can this be fixed in the forum software? This behavior was not predictable for me.
This is a good question. Ideally it should create a thumbnail regardless of which upload method is used.
I personally don’t mind the image sizes (this is a photo forum after all, and @Thomas_Do makes a good point about judging quality of some effects at full resolution).
I’ll test the upload stuff shortly and see what’s going on.
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For what it’s worth, in a recent post (What's In Your Bag? - #44 by anarcat) I have done the “drag and drop” thing in the hope it would do the right thing, but the “thumbnail” was also that huge file. I have since then re-uploaded a 1080p-maxed picture to reduce the pain.
It would sure be nice to have the full resolution images available on click while keeping threads with more reasonable thumbnails… I haven’t looked at discussions on discourse on the topic, but it seems to me this should be fixed (or reported) upstream! 
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Hm, could we, please, limit ourselves to 4.740 x 3.260 or bigger? Everything else would make next year’s PlayRaw Calendar much more difficult … 
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I’ve still got a note to investigate what might have been going on - usually the forum generates thumbnails/previews that are not full-resolution unless clicked on.
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whoops…my apologies, I do believe this is probably over the image of my photo ‘bag’ that I copy/pasted from amazon without thinking how big it was…do you need me to take it down?
well that’s good to know :)
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I’m surprised that in the age of 8 core smartphones with resolution bigger than FullHD we talk about 1920x1080 
If traffic is a problem, JS should check file size before even accepting it. If storage is a problem — server side resize can be performed.
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not every user on a mobile connection has unlimited bandwidth in their contract or LTE every time.
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Why do you download full sized attachments then?
The thing that concerns me when posting anywhere is the intended use of the depiction. And, for web viewing I really want to do the scaling myself. Having some server or browser arbitrarily select the interpolation algorithm invites image quality problems. Also, if I were particularly concerned with how my images were to be used by unsanctioned parties, I’d rather them have to wrestle with a small image. So, for most web regarding, I resize to 800x600 or thereabouts, unless the composition begs to be viewed larger. In any case, never more than what would accommodate a 10-15 degree viewing angle, which I believes accomodates the average desk-oriented viewing condition.
Here, we have an appetite to inspect others’ IQ, particularly in PlayRaw, and @chris has a resolution requirement for the calendar, so there’s a need to provide larger. For PlayRaw, I’ll still not post a composition larger than a single display; @chris, I think it’d serve your need well to ask folk for a separate rendition for the calendar, sized appropriately…
Regarding smartphones, the largest seems to be the Samsung Galaxy S6, 1440x2560px:
Still, a bit smaller than my D7000 images…
I must admit that the correct way would be to talk to people in advance and ask for the required resolution, as you suggested. Unfortunately, that did not fit my last minute conditions I had during the last years. Maybe this year I’ll start a bit earlier. But I must admit that personal correspondence to more than a dozen people worries me a bit as a non-native speaker. Answering or posting in the public part of the forum is still something else than personal messages.
But for me there is a reasons that anyway speaks for high resolution images in the threads: The things we post here are under a cc license anyway (I guess unless noticed otherwise), and e.g. in the PlayRaw threads, there is even a raw image available cc licensed. Giving away cc licensed images means that others should be able to use the picture given they follow the licenses requirements. What sense does it make then, to post a low resolution image? Does it say “yes, I give this away cc licensed, but I give you only the resolution to print on a stamp, not the resolution to print big and hang it on the wall in your home”?
IMO the traffic problem has to be solved technically, such that only when download is clicked (or the web view is clicked to enlarge the image), the full resolution should be delivered by the server. If this is not yet possible, an upstream bug has to be filed against discourse. If I do not want to allow people to hang my cc licensed images on their walls, I am still able to upload lower resolution, but this should IMO not be the forum’s general policy.
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Yes, pretty much. “Copyright” as an artifact of agreement applies to a “work”. In our realm, that work is the depicted image in all of it’s glory (or lack of). If I choose to publish my work in a particular resolution, that’s my choice as the creator. If I then attach a license to it, you now know the terms under which you can use (or not) that work.
So, if one were to take one of my CC-licensed 800x600 proof JPEGs, blow it up to 4’x8’ and hang it in their living room with the appropriate attribution, that’s their allowable choice under that license. Some of my stuff is overprocessed for effect, so that might even look good. If they contacted me for a higher-resolution image, I’d then entertain producing another depiction, with appropriate license. I was contacted thusly about a year ago regarding one of my images taken as a snapshot at the inquirer’s property, chose not to because the particular image really wasn’t of the resolution suitable for their intended depiction (gee, I need a D850… 
).
I hope this doesn’t come across as an attitude, I just want to make sure folk really understand what a copyright license really means. Some of the discussion around folks’ recent posting illustrated to me that this understanding isn’t pervasive…
Oh, back to my original post, to me it make sense under certain considerations:
- You’re concerned about how the depiction is to be displayed.
- You really want to protect use of your full-resolution images.
- You have slow internet.
For me, #1 and #3 are predominant considerations, #3 for when I travel and have to put up with dodgy hotel wifi. But, if I were doing imaging for a living, I’d probably factor some consideration of #2 into my workflow. I’m not that good at it, so that’ll probably not come to pass…
I don’t want to make more work for @chris, but sidecar files should be posted with play raw images, so free software + cc licensed sidecar and raw file = you can get the hirez image
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Hm, everybody is free in how and for what reason images are posted in whatever resolution. However, I personally think that limiting the resolution as a policy is against the spirit of this forum (and probably the spirit of the cc licenses, not their possibilities). If somebody licenses only small images with cc and makes money from the full size pictures is fine, it’s the choice of the original producer of the work. In my opinion, however, one fundamental aspect of the whole FLOSS software movement and the “ecosystem” that grew around (such as cc licenses) is that it allows learning from things others published (e.g. learning from the code of others, or, e.g., the photo editing of others). The PlayRaw threads, e.g., are a perfect example for that.
As said, the images should be downloaded in full size on demand only, not always. This is something that for sure can be solved technically. For the upload traffic, I am sure this does not play a role, and if your connection is slow it is no problem, you can always upload a small file. I only argue against making small image upload the default by policy.
I don’t think uploading small images is of tremendous help here. The moment an image is on the internet you are losing control over how it appears at the user, since you cannot control any of the viewing circumstances (display size, display color management, display brightness, surrounding light, time of day, mood of the person in front of the screen, …).
As a professional photographer (meaning I have to make my income from photography), I would hardly put those pictures I want to sell in low resolution on pixls.us to hope somebody wants to buy a full size version. I think there are better ways to increase the success of my photography job, e.g. by showing my skills on pixls.us (e.g. by posting images that are looking good even in 100% view) and hoping I will get jobs from that. But overall, I do not think pixls.us is a good place for advertisement at all, there are for sure better places for that. For me, pixls.us is rather a place to learn.
Don’t worry, the amount of work for chris does not count anyway.
Unfortunately, 1 of the 2 images that had less than acceptable resolution have been edited with Gimp in a second step. Therefore, I had to cheat a bit and reproduced these edits (fortunately it was not too much, only some cloning out of flares, which I was able to reproduce with darktable 2.5 then 
).
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