Signature Line Image Filesize

[Mystic]

Alrighty, now a newbie here pointed out that he saw a lot of people getting away with breaking the avatar rules, and while the avatar rules aren't being broken as much as he says, the signature rules really are.

After doing a bunch of right clicking on older member's signature lines, almost every image in signatures I checked was rather large, some topping out around 70 KB. Images in signatures aren't supposed to be that big, really. Seriously, the point is to keep load time down...it's been a while since I checked, and I obviously lost out because of that. It's more than possible to have an avatar and signature banner in less than 20 KB, but it requires compression and some creativity. If it's too difficult with the images you're using, just use a basic text-based signature. Image compression is a powerful tool, and doesn't need to make your image look like crap as a result.

I simply removed a lot of offending images to deal with the problem, mostly from older members that post a lot (since they were the posts that I checked).

If you have an image in your signature still, please check it against the filesize limitations. 20 KB is rather tight, but it's more than doable if you try, so give it a shot. If some people have some suggestions on how to lower an image's filesize, feel free to post tips in this topic, I'd assume it'll be rather educational for a lot of the people on the forum, and helps keep bandwidth costs down on whatever website you use to host your images.

 

[Shadow Hog]

I still think 20KB is rather asinine, but what would it matter to me when I use text? (That and it's not my call. Important one, that.)

Seriously, though, why hasn't this country gotten its act together and moved away from dial-up?...

 

[Shuffle]

I guess I'll help out with this..
If you want to have a nice sig, but it's too big, you may want to change the type of file it is.

PNG: Probably the biggest and most nice looking.. It looks the nicest and uses the most colors but the filesize usually is still pretty darn big.

Gif: Looks like crap, compresses more than PNG, but still not as good as compressy as it could be.

JPEG: The best choice out of the three, it's smaller than Gif AND it looks better, so why would you go with Gif other than for animations? Beats me.

If you have adobe photoshop, you can open that up and go to Adobe Image Ready, that program is all about compressing pictures and stuff like that, screw around with it or read the help files to find out how to compress goodly (Again, this is only if you have Adobe Photoshop:)).

The information above may not be 100% accurrate, but it was all written to the best of my knowledge.. gotta love those computer classes in school.

 

[Mystic]

I still think 20KB is rather asinine, but what would it matter to me when I use text? (That and it's not my call. Important one, that.)

Seriously, though, why hasn't this country gotten its act together and moved away from dial-up?...

I wish bandwidth wasn't an issue, but it is. The only reason I didn't notice how many people were breaking the rule was that I'm on broadband myself. However, every summer I go on vacation and feel the pain of dialup again, and I've always appreciated the websites that both look good AND load fast. It saves everyone time and bandwidth to use proper compression, and if you haven't used dialup in a while, forums are always one of the worst offenders in terms of bandwidth usage. I've seen many forums where loading a normal topic is about 1 MB with all the avatars, signatures, and other gimmicks cluttering up the page. 20 KB sounds really small, but if you take all of that and multiply it by the number of posts on a page of a topic, 20, and that quickly jumps to 400 KB. At 5 KB/s, that's 1 minute and 20 seconds, for one page of text and a bunch of little images. And that's with my rather strict limit. Considering a lot of people have used this rule to compress their images well below 20 KB, that drops the wait on many pages to about 10-20 seconds, which is pretty good for dialup.

Not everyone can afford or has access to broadband access, so it's common respect to keep filesize down to help those who don't have as good a connection as you do.

Also, Shuffle, PNG can be scaled to be even more compressed than GIF. If you take a GIF and convert it to PNG, generally the filesize will go down without any loss in quality. PNG is just a format, it can be changed to fit different needs, similar to how you can have a 20 MB and a 200 MB AVI file for the same movie, but the 200 MB AVI file is going to look a hell of a lot better. For instance, the logo at the top of this forum is a PNG, and it's 15 KB for 512x155 pixels. That's rather nice compression as far as I'm concerned.

For the normal user, though, I recommend JPEG for anything without text, and PNG for anything with text. JPEG's algorithm really screws text up rather badly.

 

[hotdog003]

Gif: Looks like crap, compresses more than PNG, but still not as good as compressy as it could be.

Ever heard of a custom pallete?
My avatar is a .GIF, and it doesn't look like crud.
... Does it?

You could even use InfranView to reduce the color depth on a PNG, GIF, or even a BMP if you'd choose to do so.

I once got about a 300x200 snapshot of a windows messagebox down to 5 colors or so, and with the maximum PNG compression, it was about 700 bytes. That's 0.7 KB!

I'd set a goal for us: Every thread on the forum has to be 200k or under. Did you know that at the time that I write this, this page with all images is only about 105 KB? It's very easy to get 200k or under par... Let's shoot for eagle.

EDIT: Holy CHEESE, the HTML document itself is more than half of that at 53 KBs!!! Whereas all the images AND the .css sheets only add up to 52 KBs.

 

[Monsteriestyn]

JaoMao1 made my avatar and sig. Good thing I have them still on GGU. Being erased without warning is just wrong.

 

[Mystic]

JaoMao1 made my avatar and sig. Good thing I have them still on GGU. Being erased without warning is just wrong.

They weren't erased. I can't do that. I simply stopped the forum from linking to it. Wherever you stored them they should still be at. I don't see why removing a 50 KB image in your signature is wrong when I have it clearly listed in the rules that you can't go above 20, and it has been for a few months.

EDIT: Holy CHEESE, the HTML document itself is more than half of that at 53 KBs!!! Whereas all the images AND the .css sheets only add up to 52 KBs.

Yeah, forum HTML has always been like that. Combine that with a ton of avatars and other random stuff, and you can understand why forums are one of the worst bandwidth offenders on the web. That's why it's so important to be clean and efficient on things like this.

 

[Ritz]

If you have adobe photoshop, you can open that up and go to Adobe Image Ready, that program is all about compressing pictures and stuff like that, screw around with it or read the help files to find out how to compress goodly (Again, this is only if you have Adobe Photoshop:)).

You don't even need Adobe Photoshop, you can just open the image in Paint and change the image's extension. Image Ready is better for compressing the images and stuff, but Paint is as simple as it gets.

 

[Omega the Hedgehog]

Note that Windows ME and below's Paint only saves as BMP files.

 

[Shuffle]

If you have adobe photoshop, you can open that up and go to Adobe Image Ready, that program is all about compressing pictures and stuff like that, screw around with it or read the help files to find out how to compress goodly (Again, this is only if you have Adobe Photoshop:)).

You don't even need Adobe Photoshop, you can just open the image in Paint and change the image's extension. Image Ready is better for compressing the images and stuff, but Paint is as simple as it gets.

I'm talking about messing with compression settings, not with changing the image's extension.

 

[Sik]

Note that Windows ME and below's Paint only saves as BMP files.

What??? I have Win98 and I can use Paint for GIF, PNG and JPEG also. BUT YOU NEED TO WRITE EXPLICITY THE EXTENSION, BE WARNED, AND PICTURES AREN'T COMPRESSED. I preffer to use MS Photo Editor (or Photo Draw in newest computers).

 

[Omega the Hedgehog]

No.

 

[Monsteriestyn]

Well at least even Mystic erased his own signature too.

 

[hotdog003]

He hasn't had a signiture for months now.
For indexing images, I'd reccomend The GIMP, but you could use something as lowly as InfranView if you'd really want.

 

[Shuffle]

Is this small enough for a sig?

 

[Monsteriestyn]

CONSOLE.WAD looks like its saying CONSOLE,WAD. Dont really matter, but tilt the mirror letters the other way.

 

[Ritz]

I'm talking about messing with compression settings, not with changing the image's extension.

Yes, but wouldn't that also lower the file size a bit?

 

[Mystic]

Well at least even Mystic erased his own signature too.

That got hit on the wipe and I never put it back. It fits in the rules most definitely, it was like 6 KB.

You're still over, Chaos Zero 64, it's avatar + signature < 20 KB. Your avatar is 16 KB. You need to lower one of their filesize. Simply by throwing it through PSP and converting to JPEG, I made it 4 KB. If you want it, I uploaded it here. Looks almost exactly the same but is about one fourth the size.

The rules say it really simply:

1. Avatar + Signature must total less than 20 KB.
2. Signature may not be excessively large physically. 150 pixels tall and may not stretch the tables. (So no 1 KB GIFs that are 1014x432)
3. All images and text have to be appropriate for the forum.

If your image fits all those guidelines, you're good. I don't see how this is so excessively difficult.

 

[SSNTails]

For instance, the logo at the top of this forum is a PNG, and it's 15 KB for 512x155 pixels. That's rather nice compression as far as I'm concerned.

Heh, and I didn't even PNGCRUSH that image...

I spent a good amount of time when this board was set up, running all of the PHPBB graphics through PNGCRUSH and relinking all the GIFs to access PNG files to cut down on the load time as much as possible.



Mystic, I'm all for just completely removing the signature feature. They're kind of unneeded with all of the stuff you can put in your msgboard profile.

 

[Mystic]

Mystic, I'm all for just completely removing the signature feature. They're kind of unneeded with all of the stuff you can put in your msgboard profile.

I wouldn't mind ditching it as well, but I think there would be great public outcry if we did it.