Pictures

When you ask about "making a room especially for pictures" – are you asking about creating a forum or section for members to post pictures of their projects, like a dedicated gallery area within the forum? Or is your question about if we will be hosting images here (allowing members to upload and store images here)?

If the question is about hosting, then the answer is yes, it has been considered. Hosting images is something that many of us would like to provide as an option, however when looking at the resources available and factoring in future growth in both membership and traffic, I'm not sure it would be practical or even feasible in the long run.

Just to run the numbers to give an idea...

An image at a decent size and good quality could be about 30KB. For example, the image below is a little more than 27KB.



1,000 members * 30KB = 30,000KB or 29.3MB

So a good estimation is that for every 1,000 members, to host 1 - 30KB image would require 29.3MB of space.

If we hosted 4 images - 120KB for 10,000 members (it's going to happen eventually ), we would need 1.1GB of space. Now 120KB is not a lot of space and I think to be practical it would be nice to do more like 300-500KB (even that's not a lot), but now we would be looking at 2.9GB to 4.8GB. Granted that doesn't seem like a lot, but the extra couple of GBs of images could begin to pose a problem in regards to disk space, server performance and bandwidth.

I apologize for the long post – it’s probably way more than anyone wanted to know.

No, thats a good response. That makes sence. Would there be a way to limit a person to so many pictures, and a size of the picture also? Or if you really wanted to narrow things down and be able to afford to purchase more memory, charge $0.25 a picture. 1 picture per person for a 1,000 people+$0.25= $250. I know that that can buy a good ammount of memory. And i know that if i was goign to post my pictures Im not gona fork out $0.25 on paypal. Im going to spend atleast a buck (4 pictures). That brings your grand total to $1000! That could buy you enough memory to post pictures for free eventualy. Again, just a thought. But it is very early in the mourning so this may not make any sence at all, considering I wasnt awake enough to find where my key went to turn my car on.
Graig

Probably a good way, if the site were to host, would be to set up a folder for each user, and then put a size limit on each folder, 120K or what have you. But he's right...that's only a few...

Most people, however, if they check with their ISP, come with web hosting space with their dial up or broad band connection. Anywhere from 100 meg to unlimited.

With that said, most people can host their own pics, and then just link up pictures to the website. Obviously some providors won't let you do that. Geocities comes to mind.

XCM if you have some pics you would like to share with us...you are more than welcome to email them to me at rowdymon@cyberbay.net and I'ld be glad to host them for you. Probably upwards of 20 would be about the limit.

Otherwise, yeah I think it would be cool to have a forums section just for pictures of projects, or what have you. I'ld also like to see more examples of diorama's...