Paul... I understand and feel for the folks on dial up. I was there not to far in the past. My saving grace was when the cell companies started offering connections a few years back, and I would be hard pressed to go back to dial up.

I did talk to Greg about it after staff mentioned it to me because of one of the images I posted. My main gripe was I already shrink my images down to 600px on the long side. To further degrade the image by reducing the quality to get in under the file size limit is just unacceptable to me. As photographers aren't we supposed to be trying to show off our best work. In some cases our best work entails alot of details that increase the file size. Also as photographers we already have a mass of images to keep track of. One image is likely to already have the RAW file, PSD file, XMP sidecar, and probably either a TIF or JPG version as well. I personally use the same web file for everywhere I post, and that is one of the reasons I chose 600px wide because most folks accept it without problems. I also use that same image for my own website.

Because I didn't want to spend the time or hard drive space just to have seperate images I could post here, I just quit posting images all together. While his log files may show alot of things... I don't think it will show the folks that either have to go thru extra steps to post images here, or just decided to quit posting images altogether.

I know a lot of people will disagree with me but, anything over 750 or 800 pixels on the longest side gives people a better chance of doing something with your stolen image. As someone who has had an image stolen in the past I know that it happens. If you go to 1200 pixels it just gives the thieves more opportunity to use your image in more ways.
For those that think they have protected themselves from cyber theft, think again! If they want it they will get it. When I was working with my son designing my website I told him I wanted my site secure so as people couldn't steal my images. He asked me to show him a website I thought was secure, in a very few keystrokes he had one of their images on his own computer! He stated that the only thing you can really do is make it to such a size where it limits what they can do with it. At this point in time I will not go beyond 800 pixels.

I'm for less restriction on file size. I want to be able to save to jpeg with exif information at reasonable quality. Having the exif stuff helps when image are hijacked. However, like Randy, I will probably stick to my current limit of 720 pixels for web display for the forseeable future.

Thus one more reason I stick to 600px on the wide side.

You guys are all making great points. The reasons for the file size restrictions are as Paul originally stated (big images on dial up = a painfully slow viewing experience), and Randy makes an excellent point about image theft. We will consider all suggestions and entertain various opinions when deciding on what changes will be coming to NSN.

As someone who got a sneak peak at the new site design, I can tell you it's pretty awesome.

I liked it when bird posting was Once every 48 hours. Every 24 hours the amount of images is a lot and I cant keep up looking at the images and commenting / critiquing them properly.
James

I'll add another vote to return to the 48 hr format.

Count me as another who would prefer to go back to the 48 hour wait period in the Birds Forum. The 24 hour period has reduced the number of comments, has reduced the quality of images posted and appears to have reduced the amount of people posting. I would also like to see the image size increased to 900 pixels on the longest side.

I would like to see the avatar, name, # of posts, Date Joined, location etc. back on the left side of the page. For me, the 'flow' of tha page is wrong with that information on the right side.
I also would like to be able to adjust the pages background color.
Bring all the advertisements down to 1 level across any page.
Have the Search feature a constant field on each page rather than something to be clicked to open the search field.
'Last Post' changed to 'Newest Thread or Topic' for each forum.
A section for announcements NOT rumors from Nikon and Canon. Strictly announcements, no disscusions.

But since I have not seen the new site, none of this stuff may even matter?

Thanks for all the replies so far -

Just an FYI when Kari said she has seen the new design she's talking about something else not involving the galleries specifically - the galleries, which will be revamped starting this spring, have not been worked on yet specifically in terms of adding features and changes. Hence the purpose of this thread for feedback.

We would like to allow larger images to be uploaded, with larger files sizes, but to also allow viewers to view smaller version if they wish. This would be the best of both worlds.

Lots of good ideas. Keep em coming!

I'm an admin on a herp forum and I know that we have our site set up to allow for a file size of XXX. I also know that we can set it up to let the members choose various things in their control panel. My question is would it be possible to have a site wide file size of XXX and then allow the user to control if they want to view the full size images (site wide) or smaller versions via their control panel selection?

It might not even be possible to have that option in phpBB but since you mentioned the above, I didn't figure it would hurt to ask.

Something along those lines is what we are thinking

But to have the images viewable at different sizes, wouldn't this require the image to be processed and uploaded at the various sizes? Also, how would this work for people (like me) who host their images at their own server and do not upload them to the NSN server? I personally do not want to have to process images for various sizes. I process them for one size only (900 pixels) for my website.

I'd love to have direct integration with Lightroom via an NSN plugin.

As I seem to view the forums more and more on my IPod and IPad I would like to see a mobile version if possible.

...there is another forum that has a feature that allows you to click to enlarge/expand a posted image not sure how that works but the feature is nice for landscapes.

Over all I think we are getting way more from NSN than what many other forums offer. The great staff and work is appreciated.
d

As for the various sizes... .my guess is it will be something along the lines of depending on what option you select the code will change for displaying the pages. Take my site for example... I just make one image file for the web. This file is 600px on the wide side. On my thumbnail images in the gallery I have different coding that shrinks that 600px image down to around 200px (I think). I'm not making new images for the thumbnails... just changing the coding so the large images show differently.

Hypothetically speaking...one image would be uploaded or linked in and NSN would resize the image inline (never upsizing) similar to how we do it with thumbnails. The end user would only view the largest size they wish to view and would not need to download the larger version unless they chose. Similar to the way flicr works. Paid members would probably get more options.

Probably a dumb question - sharpening is usually optimized for final image size - wouldn't that be a real problem w/ the above scenario?

Resizing images on the server side with something like ImageMagick with general sharpening settings does tend to result in less than perfect results. Probably not terrible, but not up to the high standards of many here. From what Greg suggests, the uploaded file would be the largest displayed (no upsizing) and not altered, so I guess viewers could ensure they are looking at that when judging sharpening etc.

The resizing algorithms are pretty decent these days and again it would be for the slow connection users and the full image would be viewable if you want to load it. I think it's a good compromise to consider.