Tek7 (Legacy)
CGA & ToJ President
Man. I just looked at LionOfJudah's avatar. 234,653 bytes. No joke.
I checked a few other avatars on the forums and, well, they're huge. I mean, in terms of file size. I wanted to post a quick Public Service Announcement asking all members to review their avatars and give some steps to shrinking file size.
1. Resize the image. If your avatar is larger than 128x128 off-site and 64x64 on-site, you need to resize it. (I'm looking at you, Bowser.)
2. Re-save the image with tighter compression. I recommend using IrFanView for the job. It's free, it's easy, and it's excellent.
3. If your avatar is an animated .GIF, consider saving it as a static JPG or clipping a few frames. When someone on dial-up has to load a 200K+ avatar, it does not produce warm, fuzzy feelings.
4. Consider changing your avatar to something smaller, filesize-wise. There are plenty of great avatars out there online and many great freeware programs you can use to make your own.
Also, if you need a place to host your avatar, please go to ImageShack. Why? Because they're free (again, very important) and they allow direct linking. No more "This image is hosted by Angelfire!" nonsense.
So, I'm going to give everyone about a week to re-size their own avatars before I start doing it for them. In all cases, I will keep the original image and use one of the first three methods posted above to help bring down the file size.
And no, I'm not planning to change the off-site avatar size back to 64x64. Ember has a nice, shiny avatar at full-size that only consumes 5,613 bytes. (I mention hers because I made it and used the "Save for web" option in Photoshop to minimize the file size. *G*) It's all about compression, ladies and gentleman.
NOTE: I know there are very few users on dial-up these days but even if we were all on broadband, there's no need for humongous avatar files. Following the first guideliness posted above should help those pages load more quickly.
I checked a few other avatars on the forums and, well, they're huge. I mean, in terms of file size. I wanted to post a quick Public Service Announcement asking all members to review their avatars and give some steps to shrinking file size.
1. Resize the image. If your avatar is larger than 128x128 off-site and 64x64 on-site, you need to resize it. (I'm looking at you, Bowser.)
2. Re-save the image with tighter compression. I recommend using IrFanView for the job. It's free, it's easy, and it's excellent.
3. If your avatar is an animated .GIF, consider saving it as a static JPG or clipping a few frames. When someone on dial-up has to load a 200K+ avatar, it does not produce warm, fuzzy feelings.
4. Consider changing your avatar to something smaller, filesize-wise. There are plenty of great avatars out there online and many great freeware programs you can use to make your own.
Also, if you need a place to host your avatar, please go to ImageShack. Why? Because they're free (again, very important) and they allow direct linking. No more "This image is hosted by Angelfire!" nonsense.
So, I'm going to give everyone about a week to re-size their own avatars before I start doing it for them. In all cases, I will keep the original image and use one of the first three methods posted above to help bring down the file size.
And no, I'm not planning to change the off-site avatar size back to 64x64. Ember has a nice, shiny avatar at full-size that only consumes 5,613 bytes. (I mention hers because I made it and used the "Save for web" option in Photoshop to minimize the file size. *G*) It's all about compression, ladies and gentleman.
NOTE: I know there are very few users on dial-up these days but even if we were all on broadband, there's no need for humongous avatar files. Following the first guideliness posted above should help those pages load more quickly.
