New Upload Limits

[Falcon Ranchero]

Works again

[TarheelRick]

  On 3/21/2025 at 4:37 PM, Dave Ambrose said:

We are starting to get tight on server disk space. I've limited the size of individual attachments (pictures and videos) to 10MB. This should be plenty big for most any picture, and I don't think more than a few users will notice a change. 

Please let me know if you have problems posting pictures. 

Expand  

If we are getting tight on server disk space, would putting a limit on the number of photos a person posts help alleviate that problem.  I have made this suggestion in the past and was hammered pretty good by the collective body. Almost any build can be adequately presented in 5-6 photos. There is no real need for a dozen or more different angles of the completed build. Moving a camera 5-10 degrees to the right or left does not show any more detail than the original shot. Just my $1.02 worth (inflation).

[Ace-Garageguy]

  On 3/22/2025 at 6:00 PM, TarheelRick said:

 There is no real need for a dozen or more different angles of the completed build. Moving a camera 5-10 degrees to the right or left does not show any more detail than the original shot. 

Expand  

Some of the more spectacular work almost justifies that, but certainly not everything.

Nor is there a need for excessive incremental multi-angle shots during the build process. 

Or copying every photo when a quote is made.

HOWEVER: the modification Dave was trying to implement was specifically intended to limit data uploaded to INDIVIDUAL POSTS, which would alleviate much of the problem for the time being.

Unfortunately it didn't go as intended...

...but everything is back to normal now.

Edited March 22 by Ace-Garageguy

[Falcon Ranchero]

I would have to agree with the above above post; I am guilty of posting quite a few photos of my models; a whopping 21 for my ‘62 Catalina; which really was more of experimental photography than the display of the model, which really may not have been entirely appropriate for the purpose of the thread. Some sort of photos limit would actually be a good thing. 

Edited March 22 by Falcon Ranchero

[Xingu]

Here are a few "common sense" guidelines:

1. We are not a photo hosting site, we can't afford it and you wouldn't want to pay what we would charge. We do allow direct uploads so that the images are not lost and threads remain unbroken, but doing your part to limit the space they take up would greatly be appreciated.

2. You can resize your photos down to 1024 or 1200 pixels wide and they will look just as good to 99.99% of the viewers. It isn't that hard to do and there are many members here that could explain how to do it, if you would only ask.

3. You do not need to scroll to see the entire photo when it is resized to a normal web size.

4. In most cases you do not need to post 14 photos for each of the sides of your model. Most models can be shown in 10 photos or less.

5. All of the photos that are posted in the General and Off-Topic areas take up as much space as the photos shown in the model areas.

6. We like to have the model photos saved here so that they do not go away when a photo hosting site goes from free to "pay us now or we delete your photos". Threads with broken links don't get many views.

7. You can still link photos from hosting sites like Imgur and Fotki. This saves us space, but there is a risk of losing the photos in the future.

8. In most cases, the photos directly from your camera or phone are huge. They can be 20x larger than they need to be on this board.

9. Videos are huge, can be equivalent to several hundred photos, even the short videos. Best to host those on a site like YouTube and then link to it.

 

We will come up with the some official forum guidelines in the near future.

[BIGTRUCK]

Its back to normal

[Ace-Garageguy]

  On 3/22/2025 at 7:24 PM, Xingu said:

Here are a few "common sense" guidelines:

9. Videos are huge, can be equivalent to several hundred photos, even the short videos. Best to host those on a site like YouTube and then link to it.

Expand  

Mea culpa there. YT autoimbeds most of the time if you link to a vid, and I've been lax about not letting it happen.

I'll be better in the future.

[Anglia105E]

Excellent " common sense " guidelines from Michael, and I must admit to being guilty of using my camera's high resolution 3664 pixels x 2748 pixels, without reducing the photos in size . . . My apologies for that 😞 . . . Also, thank you, as my ' Choose Files ' option is working as it used to before.

David

[NOBLNG]

Forgive my ignorance here, but what does 1024 or 1200 pixels wide convert to in Kb or Mb? When I look at my list of attachments here I see they range roughly from 30Kb to 1.4Mb. What is an acceptable size in these measurements? Thanks.

Edit: I just switched my iPad camera to HEIF instead of JPEG. I did two identical test photos and the change dropped the file from 2MB down to 788KB.

Edited March 22 by NOBLNG

[slusher]

Thanks administrators for your work on this situation I was worried and now I feel much better.

[OldNYJim]

General question from the mods here…does the forum software not automatically resize images to a smaller size already?

Say I upload a 2MB image - if I go to edit my post I can see that the photos are now more like the 400-500kb range.  

It LOOKS to me as a user as if the site is handling resizing already…but if it’s not, then I’ll be more careful to do more of that myself…

[OldNYJim]

Also, I would 100% pay good money to help towards hosting costs if there was ever a Premium membership tier.

I know there are cons to offering that, which have been discussed before, but I bet plenty of people find this feature useful enough that they would help towards the costs…I’d rather that option than, eventually, the super-useful and future-proofing on-site photo hosting has to go away…

Edited March 23 by OldNYJim

[peteski]

  On 3/22/2025 at 7:39 PM, Ace-Garageguy said:

Mea culpa there. YT autoimbeds most of the time if you link to a vid, and I've been lax about not letting it happen.

I'll be better in the future.

Expand  

Embedded YT videos are just links to the actual YT video - they do not reside (or take space on the forum).

As for photos quoted in replies to posts, those are also links to the original photos - not actual copies of the images themselves - no extra space is wasted in the forum's storage space. I often use the same attachment (photo) in multiple posts. Again, the same image gets used in  all of those posts.  If you go to your attachments you will see a lost of posts each attachment was used in.

It is too bad that more and more people have no knowledge how to edit their photos down to size before uploading them to the forum. As I mentioned  on one of the initial posts of this thread, I resample my photos to about 1200 pixels wide, which with the JPG compression I use it results in images less than 500kB (half a Megabyte). Many are even smaller (200-300kB or less). It would be very handy if the forum had a way to auto resampling photos members upload, I'm surprised it is not a feature of the forum's software.

 

For  example here is one of my earlier uploaded photos. It is 800X600 pixels (which works out to about 0.5 Megapixels). The JPG file size is only 90kB (or 0.09MB).  Perfectly acceptable photo for a forum post.

 

Another one: This one is 1200X615 (0.8 Megapixel). JPG file size is 100kB (0.1MB)

So as you can see perfectly reasonable quality photos can be uploaded without taking up Megabytes of forum's storage space. Yes, it takes time to edit photos, but it is possible (and I've been doing this all along).

Edited March 24 by peteski

[Ace-Garageguy]

  On 3/23/2025 at 5:12 AM, peteski said:

Embedded YT videos are just links to the actual YT video - they do not reside (or take space on the forum).

Expand  

OK. Thanks for the clarification.

I had assumed, wrongly apparently, that because when you run a YT video on this site you also have the option to "watch on Youtube" displayed at the lower LH corner of the enlarged thumbnail displayed in the post, that the entire vid was copied to the MCM server.

Is the thumbnail itself, displayed in a post here as large as an uploaded photo of any other type, taking up space on MCM server drives?

 

[Mr mopar]

I'm glad to see it working again  ! THX

[peteski]

  On 3/23/2025 at 3:41 PM, Ace-Garageguy said:

OK. Thanks for the clarification.

I had assumed, wrongly apparently, that because when you run a YT video on this site you also have the option to "watch on Youtube" displayed at the lower LH corner of the enlarged thumbnail displayed in the post, that the entire vid was copied to the MCM server.

Is the thumbnail itself, displayed in a post here as large as an uploaded photo of any other type, taking up space on MCM server drives?

 

Expand  

Since the YT video is embedded in the post, what you see all comes from YT (the large image) and it is rendered by your browser.  The only space taken up on the MCM forum is the embed code (text).  Here is an example showing the YT embed code in a page source listing of one of your posts.

<iframe width="1080" height="633" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/Qxxp0ZA0t0o" title="Bypassing a Non-Serviceable Fuel Pump Relay on a 2017 Ford F350" frameborder="0" allow="accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture; web-share" referrerpolicy="strict-origin-when-cross-origin" allowfullscreen></iframe>

The "src=" is a URL pointing to YT and used by the forum to display the large YT image on your browser. Similar to what is used when a forum user uses Fotki to store their images. The images will display on the forum's page you're viewing, while the actual image sits on Fotki servers.  Your browser fetches the Fotki image and displays it in the MCM post. 

Edited March 24 by peteski