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Getting a high quality image bellow 1 meg though jpeg compression while retaining good quality is very simple and only responsible because most of the web is consumed on mobile devices these days and may people have data caps, not to mention our hosting and image serving costs through Amazon SW3, which only go up and up as the site becomes popular again :(
-Graphic design is my job, I know this stuff more intimately than I care to.
That said I have been around long enough to know it is NOT ever a good idea to go against a tide of community sentiments so I have asked Alexey to up the file limit to 1.5 meg and add a note on the upload pages to inform people that is the limit.
There have been too may complaints about this and it will be easier to take the hit and increase the limit rather than follow other alternatives.
-Again, this was always a limit in place on file sizes at DD but due to a bug it stopped working (now it works again because the other fixes to the site), the 20 meg thing was about multiple files and was a mistake anyway.
Soon there will be a poll for people to vote on the new features they'd like for the next round of fixes.
That is good news Ozone! :)
My main negativity towards JPG is unfortunately related to Drunk Duck since the site does some extra compression to the format when uploading. The same JPG picture looks different when uploaded to comic Fury and Drunk Duck. It is especially visible with red colors so here is an example.
On DD it looks slightly smudged and some of the color intensity is dropped. Unsure if this has ever been reported but it's kinda odd.
For reference:
Full JPG page on Comic Fury
http://bustysolar.thecomicseries.com/comics/232
Full JPG page on Drunk Duck
https://next.theduckwebcomics.com/Busty_Solar/5457394
That will be because pics above 960 px are recompressed when they're resized.
Red colours ALWAYS suffer with higher compression jpegs.
I'm in talks to increase file widths to 2000 pixels and file size to 1.5 or 1.75 meg.
If you have a 2000px wide pic that's above that file size though you'll still need to compress it.
ozoneocean wrote:
That will be because pics above 960 px are recompressed when they're resized.
Red colours ALWAYS suffer with higher compression jpegs.
Well DD must be re-compressing them anyway, no matter what file width.
With 32 bit PNG that won't happen. Huge file size because it's not really made for web display, but now it'll upload fine to DD regardless and not change the colours at all :)
That's the theory anyway!
Wow, I wasn't aware that we were implementing new file size limits. I don't think that was mentioned before.
My files are regularly more than 1 MB, and at least some of the pages for my current comic have gone as high as 1.78 MB. Also, some of the image uploads for the blog area of my comic have gone much higher than that.
1 MB is way too low. I understand there's a need to prevent spammers from bombing the site with 100 MB pdf files or something like that, but nickel-and-diming us on upload size is not a good idea. The limit should be large enough to more than accommodate even occasional overlarge and complicated images, but small enough that nobody can bomb the site. 2.5 to 3 MB would be a reasonable minimum IMO, not that anyone's ever going to come close to going over that (which is sort of the point behind making it a very large number).
I used to post JPEGs on this site, and I switched to PNG for a reason. I don't plan on switching back, and I also don't plan on shrinking my pages or posting them in sections in order to get around an arbitrary 1.5 MB file size limit. That's not reasonable. It's perfectly reasonable for a 960x image file, with text, to come in well over 1.5 MB.
I'm having to work out a compromise because I'm the one paying for image hosting/serving.
Hosting costs on Amazon S3 are quite low, but serving costs (retrieving and displaying the images), are quite a bit and that's mounting as the site becomes more popular again.
What you're talking about with file sizes are basically uncompressed images. PNG32 does barely any compression at all to complex image files.
There aren't many sites on the net that do that- allow upload of 1 and 2 mg files and display as is. Most will convert them to jpegs and display a lower quality version. That includes photo-bucket, Google, Deviant art, Facebook and more.
I don't know what the best compromise is. 10 meg upload limits and post processing to compress them afterwards like the major sites?
I definitely understand what you're saying. You don't want the site to get bogged down with too many large files. It makes sense, in theory, but it also seems like you're implementing a solution to a problem which doesn't exist. I don't think there's a major problem on this site with lots of really big files being uploaded. There absolutely SHOULD be a file size limit, but it needs to be high enough that users don't generally need to worry about it, unless they're doing something unusually extravagant.
It's also worth pointing out that an individual file size limit does not protect you from spammers, because they can just chain post a ton of smaller images. Just today, somebody posted a full 23 page comic all at once.
For reference, Comic Fury's file size limit is 3 MB for comic pages, and 6 MB for miscellaneous extra image file upload.
You misunderstand El Cid.
It's not about slowing the site it's image serving costs: as the site becomes more popular those increase. While ad revenue is down from last month. It will still cover costs but it gets closer to the red.
My worry is if the site gets even more popular and ad revenue doesn't keep pace we'll have an increasing deficit.
Comic Fury is a very different site- the programmer is the owner/admin and It's basically a new site coded from the ground up. It's his own site so he's happy to pay all the costs from his own pocket. He doesn't have to pay anyone to fix stuff and more importantly he hasn't got 240gigs of image files he has to host and serve.
Without that weight he can easily use cheaper hosting solutions where storage is more limited but costs are fixed and part of the main hosting package so it's no a worry.
-there's a lot more to it than that though.
From a servwy by Alexey the average file size of comics on DD doesn't get over 1mb and average maximum file size is 2mb, so historically at least people haven't been too bad at this.
No immediate action is going to be taken anyway and this will always be up for discussion- I'm not making any executive decisions on it, everything, like this, that concerns you guys will be archived at in consultation with you guys.
I just ask you to try and see the other sides too. I'll probably post actual costs of things somewhere so people can see how things are laid out
@Genjoke, external hosting is a good idea. Soon we'll be putting together a feature/bug list for people to vote on for what should be fixed first. - based on people's suggestions.
Something I've been wondering about: would it be viable, practical or even a good idea to have comic images that you could click to open a higher resolution/quality image?
Depending on the need, the smaller picture could be either a standard-detail version of the high-def page or a preview image to the effect of "Big page today! Click to see the whole thing".
For a title like Heroes Alliance which is mostly standard resolution pages and the occasional call for a big splash page or hidden image that would probably work pretty well.
BTW, talking purely for myself, sometimes what I want is not necessarily bigger but rather differently shaped. Most of our pages are 900x1350ish. Sometimes it would do just nicely to just turn that page sideways and do a 1350x900 image.
Maybe, Hippievan and Niccea are working on a survey now for the new features in the next round of fixes.
I've also been discussing a cheaper image host solution with Alexey. The advantage of Amazon is they're a MASSIVE company and they provide Rolls Royce service for data protection.
Say what you will about DD's spotty history of crashes and stuff over the years, but at least since 2011 our image files have been safely hosted with no major loss sue to hosting!
We had some trouble accessing them when the bill wasn't paid, but our images are more safely stored than Comic Fury, I can assure you.
The issue with cheaper image hosting is that it won't be as top tier as what we have now. It will probably still be excellent, but not quite as excellent as it could be, that's tough to give up. The increasing costs aren't though.
If the hosting costs use up every skeric of advertising money that is perfectly OK (Profit only goes back into the site anyway) - it's when it starts to go over and I have to pay from my own funds AGAIN that it's an issue.
bravo1102 wrote:
I find this all very interesting. Maybe we should have a discussion on file sizes and page formats. With a survey too to follow up on Alexey's to show what sizes are preferred overall as opposed to what is optimal for site hosting and storing.
[/qoute]
The close quote is misspelled, that's why. :(
Amazon offers a cheaper "reduced redundancy" option for file storage that isn't at the level of their normal storage but it's still pretty good compared to everything else. An idea would be to move older, abandoned comics to that.
It's what I've moved all the Wowio legacy stuff too, including the popgalaxy and Shegeek video stuff that I've no idea if anyone even wants.
ozoneocean wrote:
You misunderstand El Cid.
It's not about slowing the site it's image serving costs: as the site becomes more popular those increase. While ad revenue is down from last month. It will still cover costs but it gets closer to the red.
My worry is if the site gets even more popular and ad revenue doesn't keep pace we'll have an increasing deficit.
bravo1102 wrote:
Not positive but it looks like page hits. I decided to read one of my older finished comics and the stats tallied with how many pages I had viewed. I can't imagine anyone else was viewing pages from that comic that day.
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