Picture Attachment Storage Space

[SuzukiRE5]

As you know there has been a couple of times that the site has run out of storage space for pictures and attachments couldn't be added to posts until more space was made available. The first time I deleted out some pictures to make more room. That cleared up about 10mb of the 200mb we are allowed without having to pay more for storage space. That 10mb was just used up a few days ago so I went back in and deleted a few more pictures to make more space but it is hard to find pictures that can be deleted without causing a post or thread to be ruined. So, I decided to download some of the larger pictures, modify there size and go in to the posts where the pictures are and replace the original picture with the modified, smaller file size picture. I have been doing this for about an hour and I modified 6 pictures on the site. Doing that freed up an additional 5 mb of space for more attachment storage. We now have 11mb of available space. It takes me about 10 minutes to find a picture to modify, save it, resize it, and while I'm doing that I improve the picture the best that I can, save it, go to the post where the picture is, delete the original and replace it with the modified picture. I add a note to the remark added to the post that the picture was modified. An example of one picture that I changed, the original picture was 974 kb. There is 1024kb in a mb. The modified picture that I put in was 87kb. The only difference between the picture that I put in and the original is that the size of the picture is smaller and in a lot of cases more clear and sharpened up. The modified picture is plenty big enough to view in a browser. There is one thread on the site that used up 9mb of storage space just on that thread.

Doing this is time consuming but I will do it instead of deleting pictures from the site. When I am sitting here with nothing to do I will do more of them. You guys can save me a lot of time if you want to upload a picture that is a large file size by just contacting me and telling me that you have a large file size picture that you want to upload to the site as an attachment and email me the pic and I will email you back a modified version of the picture that won't eat up so much of the 200mb we are allowed on the site. Just email it to me and ask me to modify it if you know my email address or send me a pm for my email address if you don't know it. It takes me a couple of minutes to modify a picture and email it back to you. It's very easy for me to do. By large file size picture, I mean a file that is 300kb or more file size.

The best option is to create a photobucket or similar account on another image hosting site and linking your photos from that account. The photobucket website is at www.photobucket.com . That is the site that I use for pictures.

[SuzukiRE5]

I resized and improved quite a few pictures in the last few days. There are a lot more that I can do and will do more in the future. Right now we have 21mb of free space which should last quite awhile. I could probably free up another 30+ mb easily. The clarity on some of the pictures was improved significantly after I optimized them. Any picture that I modified, I added an 'a' to the file name so if you see that, you know it's a picture that I optimized for the site. This should solve the storage space problem for quite awhile. To be honest with you, I enjoy doing this type of thing with pictures so it isn't a hassle at all.

[SuzukiRE5]

In a previous post on this thread I mentioned that if you had a large file size picture that you wanted to attach to one of your messages, to send me the picture and I would optimize it for the message board and send it back to you. No need to do this now. There is 25mb of available free space now so there is plenty of room for attachments. If needed, I can download picture attachments in the future that are posted and optimize them and replace them like I have done in the past couple of weeks to free up more space for attachments.

[Glenn RE5]

How is this site funded ?? In terms of storage space its very small...As a member of the Velocette owners club we pay a a small fee..All photos are downloaded by sites like photo bucket..I would be happy to pay say £10 a year to the site ..And could well shut out these who are just in it for the short term ...

[SuzukiRE5]

We have 200mb of total attachment storage space on the site. There is 25mb of the 200 available now after I optimized and resized some of the picture attachments. The 200mb lasted us about 5 years before it was used up. To get another 300mb of storage space is $3.00 a month but it looks like that has to be paid monthly and can't be paid up front for a year. I can contact the people who provide the message boards to see if that is correct. The possible problem I see in doing that, if the $3.00 isn't paid each month, the site would remove the extra space along with all the pictures that are using that space.  

The best way to handle this is to create a personal account on photobucket if anyone wants to post pictures to the site. Doing it that way doesn't use any of the 200mb of attachment space on this site. You use the link created in photobucket for your picture and add it to your post by using the image button at the top of your post creation box. I noticed that someone did that on a recent post. I think it was 'crit' but would have to look again to be sure. He used an image hosting service and linked the photos to his post.

With 25mb of available attachment space now, feel free to use the attachment option when you want to post pictures on the site. I will free up more space as needed but I have a feeling I won't have to do that for quite awhile.

[SuzukiRE5]

I just noticed that there is 2 mb of storage space left on the site for picture attachments. That's around 4 pictures, maybe more, considering the size of the pictures that are usually uploaded to the site. I will free up some more space when I have time to do so. The last time I did that, it took me about 3 or 4 hours to get 50 mb of space.

Those of you who put pictures on the site a lot, please consider setting up an account on photobucket or Imageshack or whatever other site you can find. It takes maybe 10 minutes to set up an account. I've noticed that a couple of the new members used that method to post pictures right away. Thank You for doing that.

In the amount of time that it takes to post a message on here about there not being any storage space, you can create an account on one of these image hosting sites. Once you do, you will find that it is very convenient to use this method not only on this site but others that you visit. Plus, your pictures then are stored someplace in case you lose them on your computer for some reason, they are right there for you to get back.

[SuzukiRE5]

I just freed up 10 mb of storage space for pictures. It took me about an hour to do. I will do more as time allows. The way I do this is I save an attachment that is large to my computer and resize it and then attach it back to the original post that the picture was on. I look for pictures that are 700 kb + in size and those are the ones that I optimize. I can usually shrink the file size on those picture down to 100 kb just by resizing them down to 800x600 from the 2000+ resolution that the originals are loaded at. You guys could save a lot of space just by resizing your huge pictures down to 800 x 600 or 800 x whatever and uploading those. Some of the pics that are being uploaded are so large that if they were printed out, a poster could be made with the picture. When they are viewed on here, they open large and then snap down to the smaller size so they can be viewed on the message board completely. By resizing them, they will load automatically at a size that can be viewed on here and will take much less file space, thus saving space for more attachments.

[SuzukiRE5]

I just noticed that we have 1 mb of free space for attachments at the moment. As time allows, I will optimize some more of the pictures that are currently on the site in order to free up some more space. In the meantime, you can still have pictures on your posts by using a picture hosting site such as photobucket.