Allowing very large attachments - will it cause any problems?
 

I own several photography forums, one of which you can see here: http://www.mu-43.com

Currently most members host their photos on another site like Flickr and then embed their photos in our threads. Some members host their photos in our PhotopostPro Gallery or add photos to posts as attachments, but in both cases I have limits on image dimensions (2048px) and file size (2MB) as well as storage limits on a per member basis.

Lately members are looking to use the attachments more and asking to be allowed to upload full resolution images like they can do at DPReview.com.

If I were to raise the aforementioned limits substantially, allowing photo attachments up to 50MB each and unlimited image dimensions, would it cause any forseeable problems? The server has enough storage space, and I am way underutilizing the server CPU/RAM/bandwidth allotments. Attachments are stored in the file system.

As long as your server settings allows big file uploads and you store all your attachments as filestorage and not in the database, it should be fine.
The only downside is that your bandwidth usage will go up and that your server uplink should be able to handle such traffic.

Thanks, Dave.