Posting giant photos

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People are posting huge photos by linking to outside storage sites. This works fine when viewing Orchid Board on a desktop, but not on an Android phone.

Orchid Board runs on very old software. The phone tries to display the photo at full scale, and only a tiny portion of the photo can be seen at one time. It's pointless to try and pan to see a photo when it occupies 5-6 or more screen widths.

The huge photos take a very long time to download to a phone, especially on WiFi, and it is even longer when the post contains a large number of photos. When using phone data rather than WiFi, these large photos use a lot of bandwidth. Plus, the phone tries to scale the best it can, and the text is so tiny it can't be read without greatly enlarging the message.

The normal Orchid Board method of attaching photos puts thumbnails in the message. People can choose whether or not to click on the thumbnail. When doing so, the images are mostly displayed scaled to the screen size.

I would like to request people consider posting photos using the normal Orchid Board method, and also put links in their messages to the full-size photos. People at a desktop could see the huge photos, and phone users wouldn't have to deal with the problems.

I must confess when viewing Orchid Board on my phone, as soon as I realize a thread contains any giant photos, I immediately back out of the thread and don't read it.

[Leafmite]

Paint is a good way to shrink the picture's pixel size. Just right click on the picture, open with paint, select 'resize,' choose 'pixel' and then pick a number between five hundred and eight hundred. The other direction is automatically adjusted. If you are going to crop the picture, it can be a little larger before cropping.

[MJG]

Ironically I have an android phone and have been trying to figure out how to post photos inline, ie, "big" as ES describes.

The reason is that my thumbnail posts always turn sideways. I've tried rotating the pictures before I upload but it makes no difference. The only way I've been able to show the pictures in their correct aspect is to take a screenshot of the picture and post that. But then the picture isn't as good.

I'm happy to give up my quest for "big" picture posting but would be very grateful if someone could explain how to get the thumbnails right. Thanks.

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To fix the rotation issue: Open the photo on your desktop or laptop. Rotate it any direction. Save the file. Open it again. Rotate it to the proper orientation. Now it should upload properly.

At one time digital photos seem to have carried rotation information the Orchid Board software paid attention to, but no longer.

[DirtyCoconuts]

Funny. On my iPhone it is the complete opposite.
I cannot see anything in thumbnails unless they are third party hosted because the full size image is always very small

AND it resizes any large images automatically to fit the screen so I can see them great or click for a really big image.

I am afraid I am guilty of the big images often as that is Flickr default.
I wonder if there is a way to set your preferences to display images at a particular size?

[MJG]

I'm on an android phone. DC, when I look at your posts with pictures, at first they're huge but my phone quickly resizes them to a perfect size for me. Fully visible.

I've found with the thumbnails if i click a thumbnail once i get an annoyingly small image. If I click it a second time it's full screen and I'm happy.

It sounds like there are some cellphone-specific variations.

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This has been my experience with Android phones from 3 different manufacturers over the years, Android 6 through 9.

[Mountaineer370]

I'm glad to see this issue brought up. I'm not someone who posts pictures, but I enjoy looking at pics posted by others. Usually, they are the thumbnails, which I click on and then they open up to a more easily viewable size.

DC, I have to skip over any of your posts that contain photos, because they are always huge and take forever to load on my screen. While the photos are loading, the text of your post is also taking up way more than the allotted screen space I have, so I'm unable to even read that. And, BTW, I am always on my desktop computer when I visit the OB, never a phone, tablet, or any small device.

I've wanted to mention this for a long time but didn't know if it was just me having the issue for some reason.

[SouthPark]

I don't mind OrchidBoard limiting uploaded images to approx 1024 x 768, or 768 x 1024.

But one drawback is that the uploaded 1024 x 768 image gets re-processed by OrchidBoard processing software - automatically. So a 1024 x 768 image that might be 300 kb filesize -- will end up being still approximately 1024 x 768 after upload, but the image becomes say 90 kb in filesize (as a result of the automatic processing).

Some nice detail (sharpness, colour etc) that might appear very nicely in the original 1024 x 768 image can no longer be seen in the 'reprocessed' image (with detail thrown out of it).

This is actually ok with me. But it is something that I noticed. The quality of some pics are not as good as what they should/could be due to the downsizing of the filesize.

[camille1585]

Really weird how everyone has varying experiences.

On my side, on an android phone the embedded photos come through fine, and don't appear too large for the screen. I find the thumbnials extremely annoying on my phone, if I click on it the opened photo is barely larger than the thumbnail, and I have to click it again to see it larger. That being said, I generally find the entire forum extremely irritating to use on a phone, so 95% of the time I'm using my desktop computer for it.


For those using Flickr, you can could the size of the embedded photo, and it's usually best to stick to medium or smaller. That could be wht DCs photos are a struggle to load for those that aren't blessed with fast wifi or a 4G mobile connection.