What's the largest image download you will tolerate?

[fade]

In a full on web page that is. I'm just curious after seeing the Axe Cop thread. I would dearly love to use bigger images in Fade, but I don't want to offend the public. Axe Cop has images ~750 KB in size. Does it bother you?

 

[GasBandit]

In the age of 30 meg animated Gifs and 8+ mbit broadband, I would say no. A 1 or 2 or perhaps even 5 mb still image would not phase me, so long as it was necessary for the fidelity and not just saved in BMP for the sake of laziness.

 

[David]

I didn't even notice a delay in loading the Axe Cop images. So no, I guess I don't have a problem with it.

 

[PatrThom]

Nope. I've been on about excessively large images in other threads, but that's because with quoting, avatars and signatures, they can multiply pretty quickly. If it's a series of images I'm only going to download once, then no big deal. But if I'm forced to pointlessly download and redownload the same image/ad/GIF/flash intro/annoying audio repeatedly, I get cranky pretty quickly.

--Patrick

 

[EsteBeatDown]

In a full on web page that is. I'm just curious after seeing the Axe Cop thread. I would dearly love to use bigger images in Fade, but I don't want to offend the public. Axe Cop has images ~750 KB in size. Does it bother you?

That depends on what kind of "image" it is.

 

[Reboneer]

In a forum thread, about 2-3 mb (since that's the only place you should ever really find stupid/awesome animated GIFs), anywhere else, 750 is at the upper end of acceptable.

 

[Deschain]

750KB for a well down, large sized picture. I've seen one picture that was 2.2 meg, 1900x1200 very well done cityscape battle.

 

[fade]

So this is a fine file size? http://fadecomic.com/preview/Page10test2.jpg

Would love to get away with that...you can actually see what's going on. The next to last row actually makes sense, because you can see the black rain hitting the beast's back in the first panel of the row.

EDIT: Loads almost instantly for me (and yes, I emptied the cache) at 12 Mbs.

 

[Seraphyn]

Loads in less then a second here, so yeah it's fine. Like Patrick said, it's mostly annoying when it's a load of images that have to be loaded. If it's just the webpage + comic image I doubt many would object to the size.

 

[Calleja]

THe speed for that one was more than fine, the only issue now is that it's too big for my 1280x800 monitor to read comfortably in

 

[fade]

Oh, yeah, definitely. It was more of a file size test than an image size test. On that note, though, what's a good max width in pixels? I'm a Mac user---all my monitors are widescreen, so I'm a bad judge of that.

 

[strawman]

Depends on your audience. I believe you can safely go with 900 wide (fits with scrollbars on a 1024 wide screen) but if you go larger than that you should have a great reason.

 

[PatrThom]

Yup. There's a whole bunch of data you can consult to determine your optimum screen resolution. Many surveys (such as Steam's hardware survey) don't even bother to track anything smaller than 1024x768, lumping anything smaller than that into 'other.' I would make the assumption that your audience won't have anything smaller than 800x600 (which is XP's minimum resolution), but even those are few and far between these days. Keep in mind that the size of the image can always be resized to fit your site's preferred resolution anyway. You will probably want to leave room for ads (if you plan to have any), but there's still the entire pacing question to address...will it be wide? Tall? Staggered? Once you've decided on format, start dividing up the screen real estate based on your layout.

--Patrick