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]

[silent killer]

well said DT

[Syxx_Killer]

Finally! I'm glad you brought this up. This has been a major peeve of mine for a long time. I am on broadband and PNG's just annoy the living hell out of me. They are completely unnecessary. I can only imagine how maddening they are over dial-up. I wish this could become a sticky or something.

[AVGWarhawk]

I believe the rules state to post in .jpg only. Please everyone, save some bandwidth and save DT's phone cord. Post in .jpg only and keep them at 800x600.

[Torplexed]

A lot of digital editing programs like Photoshop have a web optimize feature where you can save a .jpg for the web and knock down it's size to some degree at a small trade-off in quality. I'm really not sure what .pngs are useful for.

[skwasjer]

fyi,

the PNG-spec also supports compression but unfortunately not many user agents (ie. browsers, etc) do. Also PNG-format allows to keep editing information intact (vector graphics, layers, etc). If a PNG-file would only contain vector graphics, even uncompressed it would be considerably smaller than a JPG.

Now that we've got that out of the way, for screenshots the only format to use imo is indeed JPG, simply because it's easy, widely supported and it's compression is perfect for the job.

[THE_MASK]

Sorry , i forgot to convert my last picture from png tp jpg .

[Digital_Trucker]

Originally Posted by sober

Sorry , i forgot to convert my last picture from png tp jpg .

Didn't mean to pick on anyone in particular In fact, I didn't even notice that one 'till you mentioned it. Just seems to be a rash of them lately.

I just assumed that the vast majority of screenshots would be in .bmp at worst and most would be in .jpg. Since .png is so good for vector graphics, it just seems to be a "different" choice for screenshots to begin with.

I guess this one is ment for me - as its posted right after my mod release


Sorry for putting up the big png's, but i actualy thought about it and if one should be able to see the details for the mod i had to use the size.

Don't worry - im not going to post a big long post with 15 screenshots in 1600x1200 png format

[danlisa]

Originally Posted by Mav87th

Sorry for putting up the big png's, but i actualy thought about it and if one should be able to see the details for the mod i had to use the size.

Not true. A jpeg with 85% compression looses no graphical clarity but does drastically reduce the file size.

[DrBeast]

While we're at it, a pet peeve of mine is when people quote other peoples' posts and don't leave out the pictures. Come on guys, it's only a few clicks and pressing that Delete button a few times

[Meridian]

Originally Posted by DrBeast

While we're at it, a pet peeve of mine is when people quote other peoples' posts and don't leave out the pictures. Come on guys, it's only a few clicks and pressing that Delete button a few times

Yeah, I'll go along with this one. Doing a quote of a post saying nice pics and including the 10 pics in the post just for a two word response really isn't needed.

[Digital_Trucker]

Originally Posted by Mav87th

I guess this one is ment for me - as its posted right after my mod release


Sorry for putting up the big png's, but i actualy thought about it and if one should be able to see the details for the mod i had to use the size.

Don't worry - im not going to post a big long post with 15 screenshots in 1600x1200 png format

Nope, mav, I can't honestly say whose .png pinged me (pun intended), but it wasn't yours or Sobers. It's been one of those things that niggled at me over a while. I don't have dial up myself, but, at times it even slows down my "broadband" (if you can call it that) to have them pop up and take all day to finish loading some of them.

Actually, I think all the changing air pressure around here the last few days is what set off the atmospheric disturbance in my head that caused me to post the original post. :rotfl:

[Sailor Steve]

I'll back up that one, and the .png complaints as well. The only time a picture should ever be reposted is when the new poster wants to draw attention to one particular picture and it's a page or three later; and even then it shouldn't be more than one pic. And I'd think twice before going that far.