[WikiEN-l] Re: Article size consistency 32k

Mon May 23 05:13:55 UTC 2005

John R. Owens wrote:
> I don't know if this might have ever been suggested before already, but
> perhaps a change in software could allow us to set a maximum image size
> in our user preferences? Either in width/height, e.g. "always shrink
> images to less than 200 pixels wide or 150 pixels high, whichever is
> smaller", or in kB, e.g. "always shrink images to less than 10 kB".

Unfortunately I don't think this would be a workable solution, unless
a thumbnail duplicate of every image was created at the time of
uploading. That would be fairly straightforward to do, although it
would be very resource intensive on the image server(s). (Is there
more than one yet?) To shrink each image after every request before
sending to the browser would literally kill the servers.

A better way would be to allow for a user preference to have images
either on or off by default, but have a link on the page to view a
version with images. So if a user browsing with images off wanted to
see an image, they could then re-load the page with images included.
(If it's good enough for Outlook, then it's good enough for
Wikipedia.)

-- 
Stephen Bain
stephen.bain at gmail.com