Picture Upload Facility

[DaveS]

Can you help me do some testing please.

I've rewritten the picture upload facility.
It still needs lots of finishing off but I want to start to fix any problems now rather than later.
http://www.xrv.org.uk/picture_upload.php

It now allows multiple uploads (well 5), resizes the image, watermarks it, and creates a thumbnail.

So basically guys thrash it to death and report back here with any problems.

[DaveS]

Please don't use this test page to post up pics properly as I'll be deleting them at various points.

[ChrisH]

Just had a quick look Dave, seem to work fine. I always resize the images first though, so didn't test that feature...swapped over the pic of my TA wiv the Arrow can and it worked fine.

[DaveS]

Just had a quick look Dave, seem to work fine. I always resize the images first though, so didn't test that feature...

The resize should work fine.
It should maintain aspect ratio's, it understands pictures that are rotated round and will maintain the right reszing of them. Any that are the right size or smaller will be left.
I have to say the quality is excellent as well.
The GD library in PHP works really well.

[ChrisH]

What size does it make the pics? I usually reckon 400 x 300 is good enough to see what's going on! Only having crap dial-up (at the moment) makes me cautious in uploading larger file sizes... great facility anyway.

[DaveS]

Ahhh well this will create some bigggggg files.
Previously we've been restricted to 800 x 600 and 50KB's but many of us wanted bigger and better quality files.
So this will allow 1024 x 768 images with a max size around 500KB's.
This gives a fantastic image but as could be an issue for those on dialup.
I run on a desktop that's 1400 x 1050 so I tend like a big image.

Maybe I need to assess who's on dial-up still.
Sitting on a 2MB ADSL connection myself I tend to get rather blase about pic downloads.

However by creating thumbnails which can be used in forum posts this should help matters as well, so you don't need to keep d/l big images when you don't actually want to view them.

I'm still messing with the compression at the moment to find the right trade off between quality and size. At the moment the function roughly speaking reduces the image size by half.
Typically my old 3.2 megapixel camera will take images that are 2160 x 1440 and around 1MB in size each. I can upload 1 image in 40 seconds and the resized image is about 400KB's in size. That's still large for someone on dial-up however.

Anyway interested in all comments on what you all want.

[Chad]

so what would be a good average size so we dont clog up this facility or is that not really an issue

[Maverick]

so what would be a good average size so we dont clog up this facility or is that not really an issue

Think carefully about this one Dave we are talking about the most prolific poster of 2005, imagine the damage he can do with pics

[Chad]

[DaveS]

That's a very good point. I may have to put a limit on your account Chad.