neptronix said:
From being such an old forum, we have a pretty huge amount of stored images which could be cut down to about 50% of the size, which would allow us to have better backups. I believe this can be done using the more advanced ( but rediculously CPU intensive ) JPEG encoder i have set up on this server.
ah. well, thats' a different thing than what's needed by people posting.
the quote below is what people posting need right now.
A jpeg/gif/png recoder will be critical for the future of this forum when we make image uploads easier.
even just a very simple image autoresizer like at32resizer is, scripted to run non-gui automatically upon any image upload, to simply resize every uploaded image to the max the forum handles, would be a bajillion times better than having to teach every single new member how to deal with this.
(since most of them won't even bother, and will instead either not post pics at all, or instead end up just linking to some site that will only have the pics a little while then gone, leaving their posts and build threads worthless becuase so much critical info is in the pics. )
even if it only did jpg/jpeg and simply passed all others thru as-is it would serve 99% or more of posters' needs of making attaching and posting images really really easy.
an actual inline image editor/converter/etc might be nice...but not necessary at present.
baby steps.
Amberwolf, would you be willing to go through a side by side comparison of 5,000 random images to see if there are any discrepancies? I could make a web based tool that would make the job fairly easy but it is tedious and also requires attention to detail, which i believe you have..
that many images owuld take a long calendar time to do, not being able to alwyas spend much time at it at any one moment, but it wouldn't be much different from way back when i was using galaxyzoo when it first started years and years ago.
you could infact make a thread here about it and have it explained and linked here, so that anyone with a moment and interest could do a few now and then. each time someone did one, it'd check it off your list of images. if you know any other places where people have time /interest in that sort of thing youcoudl post it there, too, and if enough people were doing it you could even have each image be tested by at least two or three people before it takes itself off the list completely.
somethign to think about is that except for stuff with tiny text in it, almost everything posted here could be easily compressed more than twice as much as it is now, maybe many times more, without lsoing any useful information. but there's no simple automated way to determine which of those pics can be automated that way, so if you want to recompress everything already here in one big batch, by that kidn of amount, some information is going to be lost in those images.
the only thing you could really do would then be to have backups of everyting preserved, and hten go thru every image afterward to see which ones have to be restored from the backups. it won't be very many, and it may not even be information that's critical in most cases, but there wlll be some, probbly schematics or pcb pics, that will have lost info making them useless or at least a lot less useful than before.