Postimage.org missing images

[hendorog]

Just a heads up on missing images.

I've just noticed that any images I have uploaded to postimage.org and linked here have all disappeared.

The links that were broken were pointing to blah.postimg.org, I edited the posts and chaned that to blah.postimage.org and the images came back.
Looks like .postimg.cc also works.

[Zero999]

That's why they should be uploaded here, as an attachment, not stored elsewhere on some dodgy hosting site.

[BravoV]

+1, if you like to discuss/share/post in this forum here, still don't understand why people don't like to upload their images here embedded in their forum post, instead of using external hostings especially the free ones, who knows what will happen next if they need more money, they could replace it with nasty photos like probably pron ad. 

We've seen enough bad examples and lost thousands of precious resources as images in this forum alone. 

[hendorog]

The reason is simply because it is less hassle than messing around resizing the images to the perfect size to capture enough detail but come in small enough.

Now if the forum resized on the fly things would be different. But it doesn't. And so they are not.

[Zero999]

It's not that difficult to use some image processing software to get the image down to the correct size.

I'm very OCD about saving space. I even reduce the colour depth of my PNG files to the minimum possible. Lots of my schematics are 1-bit monochrome, with the colour one often only 2-bit or 4-bit. It does annoy me when I see someone post a huge line drawing, in 32-bit colour, when it could use 100th of the space, when reduced to a sensible size monochrome image.

[hendorog]

It's not that difficult to use some image processing software to get the image down to the correct size.

I'm very OCD about saving space. I even reduce the colour depth of my PNG files to the minimum possible. Lots of my schematics are 1-bit monochrome, with the colour one often only 2-bit or 4-bit. It does annoy me when I see someone post a huge line drawing, in 32-bit colour, when it could use 100th of the space, when reduced to a sensible size monochrome image.

Yeah I know, unfortunately I have been seriously into fiddling with all things computing for almost 40 years, and am guilty of looking for the simple solution.
I move around several PC's and just cannot be arsed. It takes long enough to draft a comment and to make sure all the facts are straight without having to smeg around with the image sizing.

Postimage.org isn't actually that bad IMHO. They seem to be able to make enough money to keep the lights on. The other guys who have fallen over always looked dodgy to me. It would probably be worth gnif putting a rewrite in though as a search for postimg turns up many posts (20 pages of 50) which have presumbly lost their pretty bits.

[GeorgeOfTheJungle]

http://resizeimage.net/

[tautech]

Sometimes image reduction is simple as opening it in Paint and then saving it in a different file type. 

[Zero999]

Sometimes image reduction is simple as opening it in Paint and then saving it in a different file type. 

For line drawings, changing the attributes to monochrome helps save a lot of space too. Unfortunately, with LTSpice schematics, it can be a faff. This is because MS Paint is buggy and reducing the colour depth to monochrome, turns all pixels, which aren't white to black.

There are two ways I know of. The first gives the best results, but is more involved, than the second, which is quicker.

In LTSpice, make sure bold text isn't used on the schematics and in Windows, turn off clear type text. Go back to LTSpice, zoom to the point when the text isn't anti-aliased (this should be obvious) and select copy bitmap to clipboard, from the tools menu. Load paint, make the image size, larger than the schematic, change the background colour to the same as the LTSpice schematic (the default is 192, 192, 192), change the selection tool to transparent (this can be skipped if the background colour of the schematic is white), paste the image, clear the selection, reselect the actual schematic, set the attributes to monochrome and safe as a .PNG file.

Another method, which doesn't involve faffing around with clear type or background colours is, to paste the image into paint, crop it to the appropriate size, save it has a 1-bit monochrome .bmp file (if the background colour is light grey, it'll change to white), reopen it, change the attributes to monochrome (for some reason the newer versions always change the attributes back to 32-bit on every file opened) and save .PNG. The .bmp file can then be deleted.

It would also be nice if there was an easy way to make 8-bit PNGs with MS Paint, for plots, where colour is required, but I use Gimp for that, if possible. If that's not available, saving in GIF is often more compact than PNG, in MS Paint, because always saves the latter in 32-bit and GIF in 8-bit.

[rdl]

I bought PaintShop Pro 4 in 1996. I don't remember what it cost but it was worth every penny and then some. It can do almost anything most people would ever need, runs on Windows 7, and only needs 6 MB of disk space. It can save and open over 25 different file types. About all that's missing is real layers. Too bad it's not sold anymore. Corel acquired the company and now uses the name for something very different.

[NiHaoMike]

The reason is simply because it is less hassle than messing around resizing the images to the perfect size to capture enough detail but come in small enough.

Now if the forum resized on the fly things would be different. But it doesn't. And so they are not.

Perhaps what we need is an app to crop an image and scale it to 1080p, then set the optimum compression level to stay within file size limits? I just use GIMP for that.

I'm starting to wonder how futureproof are 1080p pictures. 1440p and 4K monitors are getting quite popular nowadays and mobile browsers already scale down large images.

[mariush]

For anyone that needs to constantly resize images, Irfanview has a very good feature for that. It can do batch processing on images, cropping, resizing, adding borders, adding text over the images, saving to a format you set and a specific quality etc ... and it's free...



so basically file > batch conversion / rename

Select files, click Add button to add images to queue. Check "include subfolders" on the left if you want irfanview to go through subfolders if you select a folder and then click on "Add all"
Select the output folder where you want new images to be created
Select the output format, click on Options to choose various image quality settings and options (like for jpg you can set the quality percentage, or say reduce quality until file size is below x KB )
if you want to process the images, you check the "Use advanced options" and then click the advanced button and you get this:



So it's super simple, if you want something to be done on the image you check the box ... want to crop it? check crop, enter the numbers.  For resize, you can choose to preserve aspect ratio or not, you can choose to set a particular width x height , or set the maximum width or height (and Irfanview will automatically calculate the other for each image), you can choose to not resize images that are already smaller, basically you can see in the picture everything.

I often use the crop feature to remove the borders of pages after I scan them with my image scanner, and sometimes I lower the number of colors to 16 , because it's enough for black text on white paper.

[hendorog]

If it is that simple then why doesn't the forum resize and convert on upload 

All this chit chat doesn't help the 1000's of images which are still missing on the forum. This is why I raised the point, so that Dave/gnif could choose to fix that if they wished/thought it important enough.

[Zero999]

If it is that simple then why doesn't the forum resize and convert on upload 

All this chit chat doesn't help the 1000's of images which are still missing on the forum. This is why I raised the point, so that Dave/gnif could choose to fix that if they wished/thought it important enough.

Hopefully you've learned your lesson and will spend a couple of minutes in MS paint when posting images, in future.

I don't see why the administrators should cater for lazy people. Sorry if that sounds harsh, but lots of others resize their images with no problem.

[hendorog]

If it is that simple then why doesn't the forum resize and convert on upload 

All this chit chat doesn't help the 1000's of images which are still missing on the forum. This is why I raised the point, so that Dave/gnif could choose to fix that if they wished/thought it important enough.

Hopefully you've learned your lesson and will spend a couple of minutes in MS paint when posting images, in future.

I don't see why the administrators should cater for lazy people. Sorry if that sounds harsh, but lots of others resize their images with no problem.

Wow, thanks. I am really glad I brought it up now. Over and out.

[tautech]

If it is that simple then why doesn't the forum resize and convert on upload 

All this chit chat doesn't help the 1000's of images which are still missing on the forum. This is why I raised the point, so that Dave/gnif could choose to fix that if they wished/thought it important enough.

Hopefully you've learned your lesson and will spend a couple of minutes in MS paint when posting images, in future.

I don't see why the administrators should cater for lazy people. Sorry if that sounds harsh, but lots of others resize their images with no problem.

That's only partly the point. SMF has POOR image management, the file size restrictions are pitiful in this day and age (that's NOT to say they quite are appropriate for 99% of our imagery) BUT this needs be managed better for an international forum as it's not a level playing field worldwide in terms of data provision by the telcos.
Other forum SW providers aren't so restrictive when it comes to file upload size.

For many years I had truly pitiful data speeds and small size imagery made the forum usable and whenever I hit a thread where image size was large (well SMF large) I gave the thread a miss due to my download speeds.
Now with with a modest 30Mbps I'll look at any thread, pic or download link but I'm still conscious of viewing/download size when uploading any files to SMF only because of the painful experience I had for many years.
I ran Win 7 for years and used part of an older M$ Office called M$ Picture Manager for all my cropping and compression but later versions of Office dropped it. Now running Win 10 you can add Picture Manager as a free download that's part of a utility package and you can select just to install the Picture Manager for all your image management. Image compression and cropping takes less than 20s/image as you're taking most of that time to select destinations for your reworked imagery. Once you have folders in place to make all this easy it's surprisingly effective and fairly quick.

Here's how to integrate it into W10:
https://www.howtogeek.com/281913/how-to-bring-back-the-microsoft-office-picture-manager-in-office-2013-or-2016/

[T3sl4co1l]

Is Imgur.com really that obscure?  It's free to register and has unlimited hosting.  Keep your images in private albums or share them publicly for voting, whatever you want.

Or better yet, attachments here, which will presumably live as long here as the articles for which they were posted.

Or if you don't want some free third party stealing your images (most places have such terms, that uploading shall be considered transfer of ownership -- notably, EEVblog specifically does not, which is nice when you want to talk about some project here), you must pay for that privilege by getting your own hosting.  It's cheap and easy to set up, and there are even free hosts (give or take quality of service and terms).

Tim

[GeorgeOfTheJungle]

The only problem of imgur and similar sites is when they disappear and all linked pictures become 404 not found.

[T3sl4co1l]

Imgur has only recently separated from Reddit.  They've been around for, what, a decade?  (Checking, almost -- 2009.)

They're unimaginably huge, in comparison to EEVblog, say.  While themselves being a teeny, tiny fraction of the hosting that's out there.

They're fine.

Tim

[rdl]

If images are part of a tear down or repair, or something instructional where the post would suffer if the images disappear, then attach them here. On the other hand, a lot of pictures here are basically frivolous (what did you buy today?, post a picture of a cat, etc). imgur seems fine for that, maybe even preferable. I don't think you need an account just to upload a picture.

[hendorog]

Postimage has been around since 2004. Much longer than eevblog.

It shows a reduced size thumbnail and lets you download the original full sized version if you want to.

But the point of this thread has been completely and utterly missed.

There are thousands of broken messages atm which are showing nothing at all in place of the image - so you cant even tell that an image should be there.

So I found a plugin for chrome which can be easily configured transparently fix the links, so i can now see all of those images.

Of course i had alredy fixed my posts manually, which is quite surprising considering i am such a lazy bastard.

[Zero999]

Thanks for fixing the broken images.

This site also shows reduced sized thumbnails, which can be enlarged by clicking on them.

I don't see the point. There is nothing wrong. The administrators can't be held responsible for what the image hosting sites do.

I think the size restrictions are perfectly adequate for the purposes of this forum: posting schematics and photos of equipment. Yes, it could automatically reduce the size of jpegs if they're too large, but that's a nicety: manually resizing isn't that difficult.

One way to prevent this from happening is to ban the use of image tags for future posts. It wouldn't solve the problem of broken old posts, but it would force people to upload attachments for new ones.

[tautech]

One way to prevent this from happening is to ban the use of image tags for future posts. It wouldn't solve the problem of broken old posts, but it would force people to upload attachments for new ones.

Then we couldn't link images of interest from other sites.
How could SMF then distinguish between image hosting sites and just some image from any another site ?

[hendorog]

Thanks for fixing the broken images.

This site also shows reduced sized thumbnails, which can be enlarged by clicking on them.

I don't see the point. There is nothing wrong. The administrators can't be held responsible for what the image hosting sites do.

I think the size restrictions are perfectly adequate for the purposes of this forum: posting schematics and photos of equipment. Yes, it could automatically reduce the size of jpegs if they're too large, but that's a nicety: manually resizing isn't that difficult.

One way to prevent this from happening is to ban the use of image tags for future posts. It wouldn't solve the problem of broken old posts, but it would force people to upload attachments for new ones.

Firstly nobody is holding the administrators responsible.
Secondly I suggested a a simple change that would restore images in threads which currently make no sense. Of course it is at the discretion of the admins and I am not bothered either way whatever they decide. It was just a suggestion which would fix the historical record, nothing more.
Thirdy I have highlighted an issue here which nobody else has mentioned. Without this thread no-one would even know they need to go and fix any of their old threads. Don't shoot the messenger.
Lastly this has got nothing to do with the fact that I have used postimage.org before. I was highlighting the issue with images. That is all.

I was referring to the button on the postimage page where you can get the _original_ image. I.e. Small thumbnail, Click: Bigger image, Click button: Original image. Three sizes. Kinda useful when you want to zoom in.

People use image tags to point back to the images self-hosted here as well. You no doubt won't like that, I'm just pointing it out. Don't shoot me for it.
If you want the rule to be that all images are stored here then I suggest you get it added to all forums as a sticky.

Anyway I can see the images which are currently missing now. I used a Chrome plugin called switcharoo redirector, and create the following entry:

Code: [Select]

From
postimg.org

To
postimg.cc

To anyone who wants to fix their images, use advanced search and search for postimg.org and your own userid. Replace postimg.org with postimg.cc
Job done.

[Zero999]

Images on other sites can be just uploaded and attached and a link posted for reference purposes.

Yes, I didn't think about people using image tags for attachments on this site, but it's probably not difficult to make that an exception to the rule.

This is nothing new. It's happened with other image hosting sites in the past.