I tried to avoid writing a grumpy geek type rant in my last post
2024-02-11.3In_Defence_of_UMN_Gopher.txt, and mostly failed, but it
reminded me of one of my other internet annoyances which is getting
worse and affecting Gopherspace as well. People keep posting
obscene images!
Oh I'm not talking about the image content, I don't mind people
waggling whatever body part they want to at an image sensor, what's
obscene are the file sizes! So many people, presumably prompted by
their (not so) smart phones, send around images many megabytes in
size which are no more useful than one just a couple of hundred
kilobytes. Actually viewing parts of those images at the native,
unscaled, resolution, it's usally all blurry anyway. Possibly
because it wasn't focused correctly, or because the dodgy software
on their phone actually upscaled the image from a lower-resolution
image sensor in its camera, to try and pretend that it packs more
MegaPixels. Either way it's damn stupid - if the person sending the
image thinks that image really does the job even though close-up
views are useless, why are they using such high resolutions in the
first place?
But it's not just about resolution, somehow people have got the
insane idea of sharing photographs in PNG format! Images that can
be almost a tenth the size while still looking exactly the same in
JPEG format, are blasted at me as high-res PNGs chewing through
many MBs of my limited monthly internet data each. There's just no
point to that whatsoever, and I really don't understand it at all.
For a time this mainly affected emails (where they clog up my mail
archives and generally cause me headaches) and small, poorly
written, websites. Big websites made an effort at least not to
waste their own server resources pointlessly. Now though, I see
that Ebay has become a major offender. They're now allowing people
to upload huge PNG photos of items in their listings and sending
them on directly. Furthermore the massive images are downloaded
when you visit a listing page even if you never actually click to
view them full-size at all! Seven PNG photos for one listing
totaled 27MB of data! If I tried to load 200 such Ebay listing
pages in a month I'd use up all my internet data on pointless PNGs
alone, and without even viewing most of them. Not to mention how
much slower it makes the browsing itself when I do find myself
waiting for those images to load, and how that all adds to the
amount of memory used by the web browser.
It's just damn stupid, and the worst part is that many people in
Gopherspace host huge images here as well. It's actually even worse
with because Gopher there's no way to test the file-size of a
download with something like "wget --spider", because it doesn't
have anything like a HTTP size header. In many cases I have to
abort an innocent-looking image download from someone's Gopher hole
because instead of popping up after a second's delay, UMN Gopher's
little text-mode loading spinner starts zipping around like a
Whirling Dervish as ontold millions of bytes blast their way to me
while my ISP watches on gleefully, thinking of how I'll soon be
forced onto a more expensive internet plan with higher data limits.
OK, I got distracted by more important things and now I haven't got
time for morning rants. Basically, don't do that. Be like me and
scale photos down to around 800x600 before uploading, or even twice
that resolution would be alright if it's too low for your tastes. I
also play around with the JPEG compression settings for photos I
upload for Gopher, to try and get near 100KB size without
introducing too many noticable artifacts, but that is me being a
little obsessive. I do really think that for such an old,
lightweight, protocol, photos sent via Gopher should be similarly
old-fashioned in their size constraints. But for those Gopher users
who are more attracted by aesthetics than low-bandwidth, just
trying to keep photos under 1MB would be a reasonable compromise.
