Regarding Graphics During Heavy Free Republic Traffic

[I Am Not A Mod]

Hi all.

Pretty much everyone knows that things are about to get quite busy. Whenever this happens, people make suggestions such as "don't post graphics, so as to help Free Republic handle the traffic".

I wanted to be proactive and explain some misconceptions with this. For images which are not hosted by Free Republic, they do not impact on the response time for Free Republic. All our server has to produce, for a page to have a graphic on it, is a handful of characters in the form of an image tag:

<IMG SRC="http://some.url.for.the.graphic">

As such, NOT posting graphics helps Free Republic handle the load not at all. It does not take much bandwidth, at all, for the server to spit out that small amount of text.

HOWEVER, that is not all that should be said about the matter. First off, people who do post graphics should use the HEIGHT and WIDTH attributes when posting their images. The format of the IMG tag with these is as follows:

<IMG HEIGHT="100" WIDTH="200" SRC="http://some.url.for.the.graphic">

Where the 100 and 200 are replaced with the correct height and width (in pixels) of the image being posted. This is because many browsers, if these attributes are not included, will not load the rest of the thread until it can completely download the image, since the browser does not know how much space to leave for the image. This can cause it to appear as if Free Republic has stalled, if the server providing the image is overloaded or responding slowly. If you do use the HEIGHT and WIDTH attributes, the page will load normally even if the image takes a while.

Further, if you are finding that your browser is responding slowly because of images, the answer is for you to turn off the automatic loading of images within your browser preferences.

Thanks for your time.

---

[Adding a few new thoughts]

1) If you find that because of whatever reason, images are slowing down your Freeping to an unacceptable level, you should turn off the loading of graphics within your own web browser. If you don't know how, post a question here and someone will undoubtably answer (a how-to for two common browsers is listed below). Don't let the lack of a fast internet connection cause you to want to deny images to everyone else, especially when you can totally control it within your own browser.

2) That said, those who post graphics should understand that it is unrealistic to think that everyone will get the word, so overdoing the graphics is simply an invitation to tick some people off. Further, even for those who have broadband connections, and even if the HEIGHT and WIDTH tags are specified on all images, a ton of graphics can cause some users' computers to slow to a crawl by using up all the available memory. Be considerate.

3) Here are instructions for how to disable the automatic loading of images (From NonValueAdded, who added value here):

To: Vol2727

In Netscape 7.0 From menu bar choose "Edit" --> "preferences", window pops up. Click on "privacy & security" then "images" choose "Do not load any images"

In Internet Explorer 6.0 From menu bar choose "Tools" --> "Internet Options", window pops up. Choose "Advanced" tab and scroll down to "Multimedia" section. Find the "Show Images" box and uncheck it.

Voila (sorry, I spoke French), enjoy your image free browsing experience while the rest of us groove on the nifty graphics.

Other browsers have similar settings.

201 posted on 03/17/2003 8:00 PM EST by NonValueAdded ("Either you are with us, or you are with the terrorists." GWB 9/20/01)

[prairiebreeze]

Further, if you are finding that your browser is responding slowly because of images, the answer is for you to turn off the automatic loading of images within your browser preferences.

Thanks for the information. If I can find the preferences I'll change it. :^p

Prairie

[Radix]

Thank you for this.

I am new at posting graphics using HTML and all of the information that I get is helpful to me.

[Peach]

Good advice.

[leadpenny]

Timely. Good post.

[Brett66]

In general, I find 300 x 300 a good size for an image. Of course if it's smaller than that, it won't be a problem.

[humblegunner]

IMG HEIGHT="100" WIDTH="200"

I always wondered how to control graphic size, short of resizing and re-supporting.

Thanks!

[nevergore]

Is this correct?

NeverGore

[Oldeconomybuyer]

bttt

[FreedomPoster]

HTML Bootcamp

[TaxRelief]

The image looks a little wide. The image size has to be the same proportion as the original image.

[b4its2late]

Okee Dokee.

[Hillary's Lovely Legs]

Thank you for this post. I think photos and graphics are what really enhance FR and helps to tell a story.

Graphics makes FR fun and unique. For the Graphic Turds who declare that we can't use them, you have just proved them wrong.

We are winning the war against the Anti-Graphics Nazis.

[Ragtime Cowgirl]

You mean I have to add the "width" and figure out the height/width ratio now to accurately change the pic size? I had no idea this slowed down FR. Thanks for the info.

Meekie, FYI. (^:

[McGruff]

You also just provide a link to the image. If the viewer wants to see it they can click on that link.

[daviddennis]

Please resize the graphics. There are two reasons:

• The entire big graphic is still loaded and as a result it will be painfully slow if you have a large graphic that you're trying to shrink.

• Web browsers tend to be absolutely pitiful at resizing images. The images will look much worse than if you'd done the resizing job yourself.

Another related misconception, however, is created by the person who originally posted the thread. It is true that the graphics do not burden Free Republic's server. However, they do burden the server that hosts the graphics. If you don't have access to a very high capacity server, you are likely to find that your graphics are still going to slow things down quite a bit during busy times. So if you're using your company's web server to host the images, you may well be hurting your company itself during peak times. Bear that in mind before putting images on threads likely to be extremely busy (i.e. with thousands of pageviews an hour).

Remember that somewhere between 1% and 5% of total page views provoke a response from members. So for every 1000 responses, you could be talking about as much as 100,000 reads. This means that posting images is not at all inconsequential a load to put on your server.

Hope that helps.

D

[The Lake City Gar]

Somebody ping Mia T to this thread QUICK!!!!

[Physicist]

This is because many browsers, if these attributes are not included, will not load the rest of the thread until it can completely download the image, since the browser does not know how much space to leave for the image. This can cause it to appear as if Free Republic has stalled, if the server providing the image is overloaded or responding slowly.

I Did Not Know That. Thank you! I have seen the light, and am reformed.

John: This really is a common problem. Can a method be devised for FR to give size modifiers to image tags automatically, if a user doesn't provide them? Of course, you wouldn't want to hardwire them, since you don't want to screw up the aspect ratios, but could the FR software someday attempt to "discover" the resource sizes at posting time?

As a stopgap, the software could simply reject IMG tags without height and width modifiers, warning the user at preview time, and providing a message telling him what to do.

[DoughtyOne]

There are several things I'd like to add.

First of all, if you resize a graphic, please keep the same aspect ratio. If it was initially 800x600, don't turn it into a 400x100 photo. Everything will look skewed. If you're going to reduce the width by 75%, reduce the heighth by 75% also.

When increasing the size of the photo, please don't do it until the thing gets super fuzzy. Most of us would rather see a small clear picture than a huge blurred monstrosity.

Now the last and most important thing in my opinion. Folks, please do not post photos from servers that are very very very slow. Threads simply will not load if your graphic freezes on loading. When you post a grahic that doesn't work, it can practicly kill a thread.

[W04Man]

Also, I would suggest if someone is linking to a thumbnail page or "index" of images, that you also use the "target=blank" so that it is easier to navigate back to FR. An example is:
My thumbnail page of images from Last Saturday