Picture Storage

So I just got my 1st annual reminder to pay my forum dues. One of the major reasons I sprung for a paid membership in the first place was to share pictures with others. After being here for a year I am finding the storage limits to be a real hindrance. It seems like I am always having to remove old pics to put up something new, and I don't have that many up at any given moment.

Not to complain, but is it really that hard or expensive to have higher picture storage limits? I love sharing high quality, high resolution information with other members.

Thanks for your consideration and time you spend maintaining this wonderful resource!!!

Don't know how I didn't see this last fall, but it's the bandwidth usage that's more the killer than it is the storage space. We're already averaging 120-130Gb of bandwidth a month as it is. High resolution is all but a waste with online images anyway. Every photo I take and edit for my articles is at reduced to 72dpi and 1200x800 or 1024x768 pixels in size to keep the file size small and minimize bandwidth usage. File size on them rarely ever exceeds 200kb and most come in right around 100kb, The image size and visual quality is more than sufficient at those settings for online viewing.

Bronze members have a 5Mb image storage limit. So figuring 100kb per image, that's 50 images. For the forum 800x600 or 1024x768 is really all the bigger the image size needs to be anyway for the template width.

Thanks Jim....I will have to work harder on downsizing my photos in the future.

Not to hijack celltech's post, but do have a related question. If I've posted pics in the past, and have to remove some to post new, does that mean the pics disappear from previous posts?

I would imagine so as by removing it it is being removed from the server and thus won't be there to be called up in that old post anymore.

Photobucket seems to have re-evaluated it's ridiculously stupid decision they made the other year and is allowing people to upload there for free again, but storage space is limited on the free account (probably just a couple Mb). Was looking at it today and their new pricing was around $4.50/month ($54/yr) for 25GB which isn't a bad deal.

If/when Charles get some time or I find someone new to help out with the techy stuff it's something we can look at to see if we can better optimize things (i.e. maybe figure out a way to auto resize pics on upload and stuff like that), but that's beyond my abilities to tackle on my own.

The other option would be to setup a separate image hosting site of our own where you could buy storage in blocks as needed, but that's more work/money and we'd have to police it to keep the smut off of it which would be a full time job in and of itself.

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Originally Posted by celltech

Thanks Jim....I will have to work harder on downsizing my photos in the future.

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Not a problem. I just looked at my attachment storage for my account which includes all of the photos for all of the articles I have on the main site as well as all the attachments I have uploaded here on the forum. At present I have a total of 1,261 attachments that are using a total of 165.28MB of storage. That averages out to 0.13Mb or 130Kb per attachment. Rounding that up to 150Kb per image that works out to 33 images for Bronze (5Mb), 66 for Silver (10Mb) and 133 for Gold (20Mb).

Once I finish going through all the old articles and removing excess images that aren't really required to supplement the written content I'll look at where our usage statistics are and see if we can't bump those limits up some.