Image attachments continue to be a problem

[richard]

I've just deleted a photograph of an F18 photograph that was almost 400K in size. It was far too big (a tiny 20K thumbnail would have done the trick), the wrong kind of aircraft for the thread, and not exactly LNER!

This is just the latest example of the problems we have been having with attachments. Even with some tight constraints and quotas, people continue to upload large images which could be either a lot smaller or simply aren't appropriate for this forum.

400K might not seem much but they add up very quickly. At the current rate of growth for the LNER forums alone, my entire account will be over quota by Easter.
I tried to keep a safety margin but we broke that at the end of last year.

EVERYONE PLEASE USE RESTRAINT when posting attachments and images. Keep them small, keep them relevant. From this point onwards I am going to be much more ruthless in handling large images. I shall delete them without warning (and hard luck if it appears arbitrary - I have other more important things to do).

I may restrict attachment sizes even further and if the problem continues, I may ban attachments completely.

I don't want to restrict attachment sizes too much as there are times when larger high res images are appropriate (eg. drawing plans).
Some tips:

- Only use PNG for line drawings
- Use JPG for ALL photographs
- Use the maximum compression possible for your JPG images that also retains the required level of detail (in most cases, this is a lot of compression and not much detail)
- Save black and white images as "grey scale" and not "colour"
- Trim extraneous surroundings (eg. sky) and reduce the resolution - generally it is not appropriate to post >1000px (or even >600px) photographs to the web, even if most modern cameras produce images much larger than this.