I've just completed our annual newsletter for family and friends.
I noticed some interesting trends in the size of the file, even though the basic format has remained unchanged.
2002 38.5 kB
2003 38.8 kB
2004 7.8 kB (don't know what happened there!)
2005 10.1 kB
2006 3.1 MB (i.e. 30 times bigger than previous year!)
2007 7.1 MB (more than twice last year's)
Guess when we started putting in family photos?
Like most people I don't try too hard (in fact, not at all) to compress the graphics that I insert into documents. It probably wouldn't lose anything in quality to compress the photos down to something sensible like 800x600 but who could be bothered? In the latest one I've got 7 photos superimposed as a collage. I could have cropped them but it's much easier just to drag and drop.
Still, it's interesting to see how much we now take huge file sizes for granted.
It's a problem for us system administrators when people want to start emailing such big files, then forwarding them. We have sites on less-than-ADSL speeds, and it slows their email delivery, then they start complaining.When it's just for display on a screen, most pictures can be reduced to about 50kB without any discernable difference, and without going as small as 800x600.It's really annoying when web publishers don't know what they're doing with graphics and photos. Thankfully my.opera.com takes care of pictures automatically. If they didn't, their internet links would be much busier (more congested, and/or more expensive).
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