Image quality vs size - another point of view

Just wanted to chime in quickly re the recent requests from Ed Stabler and Smitty relative to image viewing on the NGDF. While I appreciate the position that dialup folks are in, for those posting photos it becomes a matter of how much quality you're willing to trade for speed, and to what portion of the distribution of users you want your images to be accessible. What Ed and Smitty are really proposing is a least common denominator approach, and I have to admit that I don't much care for that as either a viewer or a poster.

Even when posting fairly large images to the net, a photographer is already making substantial quality tradeoffs. Consider the attached example. The original of this is a slightly less than 22 Mpixel, 120Mbyte file. I try to size images such that a majority (but not all) of folks can access them reasonably. For me, that means an image size of just over 900 pixels in width, and jpeg compression levels which keep the image in the 200k range. To do that, I'm already throwing away an amazing amount of detail, tonal subtlety and (in the case of color images) color quality from the original file, but MOST people will find it reasonable to load, and it will fit easily on MOST screens. Most, not all.

To get an image like the one here into the 50K range that dialup folks seem comfortable with, I'd have to either make the image considerably smaller (and it's already fairly small by current average monitor size standards) or apply higher levels of jpeg compression, thus increasing artifacts and substantially reducing quality and detail. It's a tradeoff - there's no free lunch here, and at the size & compression levels I typically use, I've already traded away more than I wish I had to.

I don't want to burden dialup users with more than they're comfortable with, so since the changeover to the new forum software here, when I post an image, I post links rather than embedding. That way, dialup folks have a choice.

It's the best I'm comfortable doing. Down the road, I might try to embed a small thumbnail with a link, but that about doubles the work involved, and at some point, well... no it's not rocket science, but like most I have limited time to spend posting here. [Edit - thumbnail added]

Oh, the image - sorry, NNG this time, as I've been getting some recent 844 stuff ready for the website -

On a gloomy day, 844 passes through Greeley, CO with the State Fair special - click on image for larger size

Scott



Edited 2 time(s). Last edit at 09/05/2007 11:58AM by Scott Turner.