Attachments: Discussions about what are good sizes

[coopdad]

I have just set up my forums and going through the teething problems that pop up. One being the size of attachments... the default (that is set right now) is 19.5KB and roughly 620x280.
Many of my posters are complaining that 19.5kb is just to small to post anything. I have done a couple searches here for images sizes but did not find anything.

But also understand I cannot set the sizes to unlimited, it would quickly overblow my server space.

I would like to hear what others have set their sizes to... want a good balance of usability and not using too much server space.
Thanks,
John

[Princeton]

Things you need to consider..

Type of site: Informational, Education or Entertainment?

Type of visitor: Many users just upload photos directly from their cameras (these images are 1000+ in widths)

• many users do not know how to decrease photo size
• many users do not know how to decrease size of an image
• many users do not even own an image editor
• many users do not want to bother with the above

Now, that you know a little about the end-user you need to consider what is important to you..

1)__ Do you want to make it easy for your members?
2)__ Do you want to keep costs down? (resources)

[coopdad]

First, thanks for responding so quickly.

Exactly the "philosophical" discussion that I want to have.

In my case the site that is of issue is an off-road enthusiast website that could have large numbers of members and photos. They want to show off their trucks and the events they attend. And while they are technically inclined, many are more inclined toward analog (welders, cutters, etc) than digital (image editing).

Two things I notice when doing a little research:
1. this site set all its image file sizes to 1mb (but I am guessing very few if any screen shots, etc are that large)
2. the competitor site completely took attachments out of the additional options choosing to force people use an outside image hosting. They have large numbers of visitors and it obviously was taxing their resources, enough to greatly inconvenience members.

Being a new forum needing traffic I feel I need to bend a little more than that at least for now.

Is it highjacking my own thread if I ask about removing "max width" and "max height" settings? This site has no max height but on some file types set the width to 700 (I assume 700 has something to do with the width of the fixed-width style of the skin).
John

[Princeton]

You really cannot compare this site with yours ...

• vbulletin.org users are more WEB ready than your typical WEB users; even knowing this fact, we still allow up to 1mb files for those users who are not WEB ready
• an image with a width of 700 will fit perfectly in an 800*600 resolution (no need for resizing)
• height really isnt' an issue as users are accustom to scrolling (up/down) .. it's the combination of scrolling (up/down) and (left/right) which irritates users

FYI: if you are not aware, vbulletin can resize a large image to a specific size (vbulletin options)

[wpeloquin]

i'm not sure how much help this will be, but i run a gaming community forum that is decently active (50,000+ posts in first year up). i have video/archive attachments set at 20mb, pictures at 10mb, and text-based files at 5mb. i don't have much worries about storage space, as space is fairly cheap nowadays, and i don't use anywhere near my allowed bandwidth of 3000 gb/month

[ChrisLM2001]

32KB, is a good ratio for small files. 64KB for 640x480 JPEG @ 85% (that should please most shutterbugs). If your site is about photography and imaging, 2MB, as they'll be uploading 5+mpx images.

Keep in mind, as stated above, that folks tend to not check their files sizes and may even want to upload in .raw format (HA!). Unless you have an unmetered bandwidth and plenty of memory for Apache to serve images, you will have to set some file size limit for attachments.