Eshin Direct

Digital cameras are perhaps the woe of anybody whose had to manage an email server or website that allows public uploads to the server. Well, those of us that have our own hosts or servers that aren’t sys admin people at least.

What’s my gripe with digital cameras? Well, it’s not so much the cameras themselves but it’s the folks that use ‘em. Of course, we all want the highest possible resolution and resultant “oh-ah” quality when we capture the memories that we’ll supposedly treasure for a lifetime yet still need a picture to remind us of them. But folks, taking pictures and distributing them on the web is a very different thing.

If you want your audience to be impressed at all by your photos, then do the world a favour and compress them, resize them, step on them, or whatever you need to do to get the photos down to a maximum size of 80k. You’re not sacrificing that much noticeable quality for the average “hey, take a look” objective of distributing your snaps. If I want the hi-res versions, then I’ll ask for ‘em. Hell, if porn sites can do it, so can you.

Why am I feeling particularly touchy about this? Two incidents recently.

The first is on a website I run where members can upload their pictures to the site. Each member gets about 10 MB of space to do upload, which in my opinion is more than sufficient (based on the 80k rule this is about 125 pictures). I got complaints that they were no longer able to upload their images and so went off to investigate. When I FTP’d into the site, it turned out that people were happily uploading 800-900k pictures up there. Err…right…so are we surprised that we can upload only ten or so pictures?

Sure the server software should tackle the issue of resizing these images to acceptable display parameters but the original files still counted towards their limit. My point is that if you want to display your happy memories on a site, get them down to around 40k in size. I reduced 56 MB to 5 MB without a loss of reduction in quality (i.e. “you get the point” quality).

And right now, while I type this post, I’m waiting for a 15 MB email to come through on my public email account. It has to travel to my domian server, my spam filter server, then to my spam guard programme on my computer then finally on to me email client. I somehow doubt it will get there.

The thing is that most people sit in their offices and fire away those large emails without a second thought. This could be forgiven in an enterprise environment where the necessary top grade infrastructure is in place to deal with these large emails and also the security risks that they pose. The business needs must also be met too although FTP and a good collaborative system should negate the need to send larger than 1 MB emails.

The problem is the cross over between personal email and business email; especially since digital camera usage is on the rise. Most personal emails will either go through free email services like Hotmail or Yahoo, or alternatively through your own domain name which will be hosted out somewhere. Most personal hosting accounts only give their clients a low quota of disk space and bandwidth. Even if you have a large account, their email servers are most likely to be configured to accept only emails that are individual under a certain size due to the security risks involved. And I don’t need to point out the 5 MB limit on free email accounts.

I had one girl who kept crashing my computer because she thought I was actually interested in having every new photo of her sent to my hotmail account when I could quite easily walk one minute and see them on her computer.

Am I being overly anal about the file sizes? Probably not. But From a tech and security point of view. Malicious virii and scripts can be put into a file that is around 1 MB in size which should make sending just one picture of 800k a security risk via email let alone uploading to a website.

From a social point of view? Also probably not. Like the telephone, the phone is there for my convenience and I’ll answer it when I want to. If you send me email then you really are entering into my territory and you should be courteous enough to make sure that it’s convenient for me to open. Considerate in snail mail terms. What do you think I’d appreciate more? A picture of you and an elephant from your recent holiday or you actually delivering the elephant to me so that I can really experience him as you did? I’d be happier with the snap shot and probably return the poor elephant back to sender. If I really, desperately need to experience the elephant as close to your experience as you did, then I’ll inquire about replicating it for myself on my own terms.

So too in the digital domain. Share your experiences with everyone by all means. Just leave those hi-res versions out of the general “hey, take a look” distribution environment. Unless you are in the printing, advertising or graphic design business, most people won’t care that you didnt’ send through the hi-res photos. But they are likely to be annoyed by you crashing their inbox. Sadly, most people are lazy or have no idea about how to compress or resize their images.