Photo Gallery Update
If you have been one of the members who has been struggling with a full Photo Gallery.... relief is here!
Believe me, we, the staff, have been discussing and analyzing the problem, and trying to come up with an equitable solution...
..one that will keep the site running smoothly and allow our members to use the ClubCobra Gallery to enhance their posts and just have more fun here.
Most of the recent issues have resulted from our re-activating the Quota System, limiting Members to 5 meg of space and Contributing Members to 20 meg of space.
Honestly, we had "the gates down" for a while and many have loaded up their Gallery with loads of v-e-r-y large images.
Understand that the raw images from today's big-megapixel cameras are great for photo printing or magazine publishing...but are grossly overkill for use on the web.
2, 3 and 4 meg images are just a waste of space for our use. The system will work with a little help from us in the back room...and a little cooperation from our members.
So...we have reviewed our capabilities and made some significant changes to the Gallery specs.
First, we have significantly
increased the member's quota.
Now, registered members have
20 meg of Gallery storage, and Contributing members have
100 meg of space.
We have rechecked the Gallery configuration and now you should see an accurate "gas gauge" of what you have available and what you have used so far, when you go to the Upload Photo page.
Next, we have put in place some image size constraints.
After a lot of discussion, we decided that 300k as an image file size and 1300 x 1300 as a pixel size is more than sufficient for our use.
Typically 1280 x 1024 is a gloriously large and quality image for the web.
We have fixed the issue that was there in the past; now, if you try and upload an image larger than 300k, it will fail with an Error Message... telling you that the file size is too big.
Further, we have put in the software an
automatic resizing program...if you upload a file (of course, less than 300k) that is larger than the maximum acceptable pixel size, the Gallery will automatically downsize the picture to something just below the 1300 x 1300 limit, while maintaining the correct aspect ratio. (That means no linear distortion when the image is shrunk)
Hopefully, these changes will help most members manage their pictures more easily.
If you still at the max with your present Gallery files, you might want to review your Gallery and exchange any of your old "gigantic" files for a similar picture of a smaller file or pixel size.
As I told someone recently who had a Gallery issue with the 5 meg:
Quote:
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Your two 2.5 megabyte pictures have used up your whole quota.... if you used pictures that were 800x600 and 50k in size, you could have 100 pictures instead of 2!
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If you are not familiar with the tools on your PC for photo editing and resizing, try the Powertoys Image Resizing Tool that is presented in the sticky thread in All Cobra Talk.
Tips on Picture Uploads and Image Sizes
Please contact us if you have any specific issues and we will try and work them out.
Thanks to Brent for getting these changes in place on the overnight
Have fun
Ron
ClubCobra Moderator