Morgan And Peace Dollars

Why don't you put together a step by step process for posting photos, bobby131313? So many here, new and old, struggle with the process that it may be time for you to do so. Nobody cares about how big the photos should be, they just want to post them.

I recently wrote some short instructions on how to upload images. If you want I can post them here.

The only thing that could possibly make it any easier is if clicking the Upload Photo directly opened a file browser / folder picker dialog box instead of requiring you to do two separate actions (choose the photo through one button and then upload it using a second button)

CCF puts a cap of about 300KB on photo uploads -- this helps mobile users & people on bad connections, and prevents wasting data by forcing users to load threads with 500MB worth of images.

I do not find the current system difficult to use at all. When you upload a picture to your computer from a scanner/camera/SD card, or download a picture from the Internet, it is stored in a folder on your computer. All you have to do to make it show up here is navigate to that folder and choose to upload it.

I think what probably "gets" most people is that very few modern photos are under 300KB. (My DSLR defaults to 24 MP 3600x3600 photos of around 28MB each.) The average cell phone photo (e.g. an iPhone 6/7 or Galaxy 6/7) is around 3-5 MB, as are most 8-12MP digital camera photos. You have to configure your phone/camera to save files in a "small" size -- on my Samsung Galaxy, photos can be saved as Large (100%), Medium (70%) and Small (30%) so I set it to Small and that way they can be e-mailed and uploaded. The Image Optimizer used here is great for fixing the photos down to 300KB or smaller, but I admit it's not the easiest to use. Ideally, the forum code would have a script that "resizes" photos down to 300KB automatically, instead of requiring manual fixing by the end-user, but that costs both time and money to implement.

In this era of seemingly infinite storage available at seemingly negligible costs, we think nothing of having 1TB of data on a hard disk, or of downloading a 20GB 1080p HD movie, nor having a photo album with 500GB of photos in it. That's fine when the data is stored on YOUR equipment. When it's stored on someone else's server, they have to pay for it -- imagine how many hard drives you'd need if you had 20,000 users each trying to store 500GB of their photos on your website! Server storage space is not cheap, especially when you run forums that are, by and large, free (I estimate less than 20% of CCF regulars are supporters.)

My first computer stored data on a cassette tape -- it could hold about 20KB, quite a lot in an era when most programs were well under 4KB -- and I remember being insanely happy with a 10 MB hard drive in an IBM XT...things change.

And every person that posts with an outside image sources will have TONS of completely useless posts when their image source is done.

The biggest one that comes to mind is coop. Every one of coop's incredibly helpful posts will be useless if something happens to inkfrog, or god forbid him. Years and years and years of super quality posts gone.

Also as I said already the only other option is to have images compressed to around 250K when uploaded like other places do. I tried that and people screamed bloody murder.

August of last year we added another disk just for image uploads, it's already over 20% used. This disk alone per month costs triple what most of you pay per month hosting. When this disk is full, I have to start deleting old images. Don't even get me started on people that upload completely irrelevant 300KB images just trying to be funny. Happens a lot.

If every image on the disk that's like this.....

274KB: Not cropped, 99% jpg compression.


Was like this... (took me 15 seconds to tweak)

38KB: Cropped, rotated, 75% compression.


Then the new disk would likely be less than 5% full.

But unfortunately a lot of people don't care or can't be bothered to take 10 minutes to learn something.

1. "Switch To Full Reply".
2. "Free Image Optimizer" - opens new tab.
3. Drag image to "Click to open file picker or drag and drop images here" green box <OR> click green box, browse, and open it.
4. Select thumbnail image to work on if you upload more than one.
5. Rotate image as needed. Hover over image and rotation arrows appear in upper left.
6. "Crop Image", drag corners around image, "Apply Crop".
7. "Width" - change to value near or equal to what is displayed, to avoid sizing glitch I described in my earlier post.
8. "Save Image(s)"
9. Click green download arrow on image(s). Original file name will have "ccfopt" appended.
10. Switch back to "Full Reply" window.
11. "Upload Image" opens new window. "Browse" to new "ccfopt" image, "Open", file name selected appears next to "Browse" button.
12. "Upload File to kbbpll's post".



These steps typically take me under 2 minutes. A lot of that time is waiting for the computer and browsing my cluttered Downloads folder in step 11.

If you use a phone or digital camera, you _know_ you're going to have to go through either the CCF image optimizer, or your own, or you have your camera set to "small", or etc. The size limit here is clearly not going to go away any time soon. Steps 2-9 above will have to be done, whether using CCF or something else.

Echoing @paralyse, I spent my career in IT, starting with a system in college where you had to walk a quarter mile across campus to the computer center to get a hardcopy printout, to the original IBM PC where you had to keep swapping the "program disk" with the "data disk", all the way to being a database architect for Microsoft's Bing Maps where we have petabytes of storage in three trailers processing images 24 hours a day and the database servers cost $30,000 each. Even then, you _still_ had to be conscious of space limits. I can guarantee that when some rogue programmer ran a new process that created millions of useless files, we tracked him down and flogged him. Storage isn't free, and even in today's world of the "cloud" all that stuff still lives on physical storage in a data center that has a limit.

Maybe the steps above are a bit kludgey, but the overall process to me is sound. If you just practice it a couple times, it all works just fine.

Someone please tell me exactly what is hard to do regarding uploading pics. I registered on CCF only last year and I didn't have a hard time uploading pics from the first minute I registered here.

I think what differentiates this site from others is that it's specific to coins and currency. It's not Facebook or Snapchat. A 2MB blurry image that's 90% background is useless. Forcing people to be better stewards of their images is a good thing. My first topic almost 5 years ago contained images, and despite a crappy camera and worse photo skills, it wasn't that difficult to crop and post them here. I hope the steps outlined above helps somebody.

Personally I like the optimizer and become really frustrated when I search for old threads and pics are no longer there because they used an outside host. I think we should quit allowing that or like Bobby said we'll have useless old threads.