I've meant to add it for a while, but last night one new school sent a dozen BMPs via email. They all bounced, with the message:

One of your files was *not posted* to your Weblog because it was not a JPG or GIF. Nor was it a .doc, .wps, .xls, .ppt, .pub, .rtf or .txt. Nor another video format we understand.

Now, we accept them. Though, we promptly convert them from BMPs or PNGs into JPEGs and carry on as before.

Warning! BMPs are invariably huge! A single file maybe 170k, where as when we convert it to JPEG it drops to 17k. That's an order of magnitude smaller. It doesn't make any difference once it's here. But sending them... It maybe better to convert them yourself, to the smaller JPEG format, before you send. It'll go up the pipes quicker and you can get more to an email.

With GIFs, we treat them slightly differently. We keep the pop up as a gif, but convert the thumb into a JPEG. For two reasons: when you shrink a GIF and keep it as a GIF, the image invariably becomes unviewable, you lose the image. And, you'd probably want to keep the pop up as a GIF, because it must have looked right when you sent it. For example, when I snap a screen shot as a GIF, it looks pretty much as I see on screen, though it's only in 256 colours. It's crisp and sharp. But if I snap a JPEG, it becomes muddy and a little blurred.
# Posted by steve hooker at 23/1/09; 2:34:08 PM to the How tos dept.
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BMPs and PNGs are now cool

This is an email I've sent to Bodnant Infants. They've been sending lots and lots of images to their front page...

50 and 40 images in a post and two of them on the front page and several like it. Adding up to around 300 thumbnails, each at about 8-9k.

Big fat front page.312 images.Mainly thumbnails at 8Kb each.

EXCELLENT! BUT your front page weighs in a nearly 3Mb to down load.When I first started out 'back in the day' there was a competition to get the best looking page in under 5k. Yours is a whopping 3,000k. I saw it at 4Mb a week or two ago.

Broadband these days is good, but not everyone has it. Sure, they accept having to wait longer. But even with my wide broadband, I like to have several tabs open at the same time, mainly other schools... Your crashing my browser! I use Firefox and it has a memory leak.

I mean it's brill that you're sending so many images, but your home page is getting too fat. It's getting painful to visit.

So... Three options.
One. Decrease the number of news items on the front to less than 30. Say 10. Decreasing page size by 1Mb
Two A. Have smaller thumbnails. Stick [s] as the first thing in your subject line. Decreasing page size by 2Mb
Two B. Stick [xs] in your subject line. Decreasing page size to something really small ;-)

Three. Doing both above. Decreasing page size to 500k. Or with [xs] something really, really, really small.

Symbol	No in row	Pixel widths	Notes
[xl]	1	450	Filling available width of column
[l]	2	200	Default size
[m]	3	110	Optimum for captions
[s]	4	60	Captions very narrow
[xs]	10	30	No captions with these tiny thumbs

[Later:] Jemma, the person who emails the pictures in called back, said she was laughing about my email. I do like to make them funny, but perhaps you have to know me to see the joke. She didn't quite understand the issue, though did say that she was having problems herself, opening the page.

We settled on chopping the number of news items to 10, from 30. This has chopped the page's download to less than 1Mb. And, from now on she's going to add [s] to the beginning of her subject line, to make the thumbnails 60pixels rather than 200.

Remember, this is just smaller thumbnails, the pop up large version remains unaffected.

Also, though the page is now 1Mb instead of 3Mb, it still quite large. When you consider that when the browser opens the page, it uses more RAM than1Mb or 3Mb. For example: now the page is 1Mb download. But, when I open it, it adds another 15Mb of RAM. If it was 3Mb, perhaps it would add 50Mb of RAM. Were I to have several pages open in tabs... My browser would start to run really slowly, sluggish or freeze.

So... A smaller, faster front page = happier surfers. They update often too, it's like a firehose of photos :-)
# Posted by steve hooker at 23/1/09; 12:26:13 PM to the Community dept.
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Big fat front page :-)