profile image sizes

Could those of you who have a link to a photo or image of yourself in your profile please check that it's a reasonable size?

5k is plenty good enough for a nice image to show up next to your posts.

But there are some way bigger than that.

Have pity on us on puny 56K modems (or slower) users! Seeing the big picture can more than double time time it takes to browse a thread.

Thanks!

It's a valid point. I ran mine through IrfanView, setting the PNG compression to maximum and reducing the colour depth to 256 colours. It halfed the file size from 6.71KB to 3.31KB .

(Note: If you have a GIF image, try it in PNG and see if it makes the file size smaller. PNG is so much better than GIF anyway... if only Internet Explorer supported it fully...)

Do I look to you like an offender - when you view this post?


[edited - e.g. The animated one - in case I change it back to a static one]

I've got images turned off I don't need to see a pic when I'm reading what you typed.

Any time I load a longer thread, it takes ~10s till all the images have been loaded, because of all those animated and large images. (And I have a 768k DSL) So: Yes, a bit. A 26K animation instead of a 2K still is a bit useless in my eyes.

But I like having images turned on. It makes me spot my own posts easier. And its easier to follow who said what in a longer discussion in flat mode.

[Edit]

And another thing: When I started here, I had a 10K image as avatar. My homepage has a 1GB/month bandwidth limit. Since I don't have access to the logfiles, it took me quite some time till I figured out that my avatar was accessed about 50.000 times per month from different fora. my site even was down for some days because of this issue...

This is a trial post.
I have looked through quite a few threads/posts and yours is the only photo I have spotted.
Is having a photo not de rigeur?
I can't resist this;
Hannibal to Clarice (sucking through teeth)
"So you made it all the way to the O-D-P"

I tried to put my photo up, but the TSA warned me that my photo could be construed as a terror threat....

Spectregunner
I know I'm dense but TSA?, I've heard all about the dept of Homeland Security (and the O-D-P)...did you know that GBjr was here in Australia yesterday + it's day 2 of the Indy Car carnival here and locally we have a big "bikie" mob formed from Vietnam vets and yesterday they were in convoy and passed my place (near Surfers Paradise where the race is). All on Harleys, took about 5 minutes at least 3-500 , awesome.
Hannibal to the Senator
"Love ya suit"
PS What is that logo? Looks like a Rat on a Rocket...

I agree that a lot of hits on a little pic can add up. Still, windharp, I wouldn't have guessed it would lock your site up for days at a time.

The bandwidth I have is very limited, I agree to that. My site and everything related to it (downloads etc.) needs about 300-400 MB per month which is half of what I have got. But since it is free and quite reliable, I won't complain.

(And the images I use on my DMOZ profile use 100-200MB per month, which is just a guess since I don't have a counter in there yet. I think I will implement one to monitor that soon.)

Lets calculate a little:
Say that a typical thread in here has approx 20 reads (submission state as example - other areas have much more).
Lets say I would post to only 5 of them each day (There was a time I posted to much more) that sums up to 150 per month.

That are 3000 impressions per month only in RZ. An this is not the only place I used my Avatar in. I removed most of the others, since the places were even more crowded than this one

But a typical browser will cache the picture so someone reading several of your threads will only load it once.

From the access log, I find that mine was loaded 283 times in September and only 110 so far this month.

It also depends on post frequency. From what I can tell, windharp has the highest number of posts for any member of this board, so his messages, and therefore his profile piccy, will show up more often.

Thatcher:

The logo is use is the unit patch for the USAF 16th Special Oeprations Squadron. More here

spectregunner:
Great stories and pics on your site.
I'm guessing Transportation Security Administration.
I searched for it on this new thing called the Inter-Net, it's amazing how useful it can be.
The picture of the gunship "cone of fire" is a powerful image, time-lapse says a lot sometimes.