File Size

I notice that some of more recent posted photos are pretty good sized, KB wise.  For people stuck with dial-up, (yes, dial-up!), page downloads become excrutiatingly slow.  Once a large file is downloaded, many times it needs to be saved then re-sized in order to make it viewable as a practical matter.
Most photos seem to be suitable when posted in a range around 100KB or even smaller.  Might be something to consider.
May save a lot of upload and download time for many people.
Thoughts everyone?

I agree, 3.5 MB is quite a large download for an image. I'll consider decreasing it if there's support for it, to maybe 1 MB.

100 KB is too small of a limit, as lots of quality pictures are above that. If you're stuck with dial up, well... it's not good for you, but don't expect everyone else to adjust to you.

By the way, if you have a good browser, you should never have to resize an image with a large resolution. For example, when you view an image by itself, Firefox resizes it automatically to fit the size of your browser window.

All I can say is NEVER resize the pics please!! I am sick of people compressing pics way too much to save a few KB. That said, there should probably be a limit on the size you can upload.

There is currently a limit, it's 3.5 MB. It's just such a large limit that it barely limits anything.

This thread is to help me decide whether I should lower it to 1 MB or thereabouts.

Make the larger pictures files to into a files section or something. It would be a shame for them to not be available at all in those resolutions.

I say leave it unless it's a cost/bandwidth issue for you.  It isn't a problem for most people who know their way around the Internet, I'd imagine.  Really, though, the main thing that comes to mind is that you never know whether or not there's someone out there with some Holy Grail of pictures that is exactly what you want to see - and it might be 3.5mb, and they might not know how to fix it.  The point is I think you should allow for more possibilities rather than fewer (which I know might seem to contradict my age argument but that had different possible consequences).

On the other hand, if you see the file size eventually becoming a cost/bandwidth issue for you in a few years when this site is wildly successful it might be a good idea to reduce the limit now while you're figuring things out rather than later when you have more users to potentially disappoint with such an announcement.

It's not really a cost issue right now. If it does become a cost issue in the future, it won't be too heavily influenced by allowing the limit to be 3.5 MB, as very few images actually go that high in size--rather, it'll happen because too many people view the smaller (i.e., 1 MB and less) images too many times. (But don't worry, we're not even close to that now!) And decreasing the limit below 1 MB would seriously impact the opportunity to upload high-quality images.

Keeping it at 3.5 MB sounds sensible to me for now. This is, after all, an image sharing site, and I feel giving people the ability to upload high quality images is a part of that. The vast majority of images, however, are still around 300 KB I'd say, which is closer to being OK for dial-up, and if it's not, nothing can be done about it. Many of the bigger images still only reach about 1 MB, which should be fine for cable and DSL- if you're on dialup and see an image taking too long, feel free to move to a different one or just keep waiting. On decent cable connections even a 3.5MB image shouldn't take more than 20-30 seconds, probably less.