Screenshot etiquette

[Digital_Trucker]

[rant]

I know it's going to sound like a broken record to anyone who's been around for a while, but, IMHO, we need to set some kind of guidelines for posting screenshots. The only rule I think is absolutely necessary is that no one should ever post a screenshot in .PNG or .BMP format. There seem to be quite a few folks using that format lately and it just isn't suitable for viewing on a website.

While many of us have broadband, some of us are still using dialup (or like me don't have the fastest broadband in the world).

Just to give an example, I recently viewed a post with a 640x480 screenshot in png format that weighed in at a "morbidly obese" 1,461,277 bytes. That's a 3 minute 23 second display time on 56K dial up. Using a completely free image editor (Paint.net, there are many others that can be used) that same screenshot converted to jpg format at 95% quality ended up being 100,902 bytes. That's 14.5 times smaller with no loss in quality that's discernible to the human eye. This size could be reduced even further with a lower quality setting without much loss in qulaity, but even at this size it reduces the display time for that picture from almost 3.5 minutes to 14 seconds at dial-up speed.

So, please folks, save yourself some upload time and save us all the download time and convert your screenshots to jpg.

[/rant]