how big should you make pics in mb's

[dvtimes]

How big should the members area pics be in mb (mega bytes)?

[Merlin]

The average for full size pics is between 100 to 200 kB. Some sites which offer very hi-res pics offer them at 500 - 1500 kB. Sorry I assumed you meant size per pic not the total size of the members area. Did you?

[alan]

Our's are between 100 & 250 kb (it is usually the outdoors pics that are larger)

[Elisha Jade]

Mines the same although i do have a couple of sets where the background is very detailed and the pics are 400kb - people have complained they take too long to load.

[ApacheAnderson]

What question are you really asking? what resolution should they be, or how compressed should they be?

From what I've seen in some better know sites members areas you don't have to bother going too high resolution wise, I know of a program who's members areas pics aren't really much larger than 600x800 and it doesn't really seam to be harming them.

I should imagine trying to scroll whilst wanking could be a real pain.

Compression on the other hand I think is important. Over optimized pics really bug me and I think with more and more people getting TFT monitors then you have to be careful. Personally I never go bellow a JPEG rating of 60 when compressing images. I'll go a little lower is the image is purely a photo but that's rare for the work I do.

[Merlin]

I should imagine trying to scroll whilst wanking could be a real pain.

Your comment begs an interesting question. Does anyone know how most surfers view images? Do they use them by viewing them on the site or download the pics to their pc and then view the images using an image viewer like Irfan View which allows you to flick quickly between the image at full screen size or full image size. I would guess the latter.

[cock-a-leekie]

I usually have thousand by seven @ 88% compression. Equates to 125-250k depending on the brightness & colour saturation.

[cock-a-leekie]

Just to add - I get around 125-250k for indoor photos with flash. Outdoor pics are waaaay bigger, due to the spectral brilliance.

[Geezer]

Different pics look different with the same amount of compression but you could probably get a 400k image down to 100k or less without it being really noticeable.

Of course it also depends on the niche, a top glamour type pic would suffer whereas an amateur or voyeur pic wouldn't if you went down even lower than 100k. Actually though the pxel size will affect the mb as well.

[Rosie]

What is it about green? All our outdoor pics are enormous if they're against green - drives me nuts

[strictlybroadband]

What is it about green? All our outdoor pics are enormous if they're against green - drives me nuts

I think it's because outdoor scenes aren't so much green as green, green, green, green, green etc.

[mysatin]

What is it about green? All our outdoor pics are enormous if they're against green - drives me nuts

It's a problem with lossy compression algorithms (such as jpg, mpg, etc) - there is a huge amount of detail in the grass or tree (think how many blades of grass there are) and the JPG compression cannot automatically tell if it is the grass or your model that is more important... :(
It's made worse by things that are green, as most lossy compression algorithms make use of the fact that the human eye can tell differences in brightness easier than it can tell differences in colour - green is in the middle of the visible spectrum and hence is the "most important" colour... (for the YCbCr colour space at least)

More info than you probably wanted... (but I did study science at school, and it would seem to be a waste of tax payers money if I didn't pass on what I learnt in at least some way... :) )