Why is the avatar file size limit so low?

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I've been wondering this for a bit - It's been a while since I last checked, but the current file size and dimension limits seem fairly small. Have they been changed since the site went up? It seems like computers would have advanced by now...

There are over 70,000 members on here, and Alex has to pay for a lot of things to keep the site going. it simply costs too much money to let people have whatever kind of avatar they want, so there's a file limit in place so the website doesn't crash.

Ah, that makes sense - although maybe re-evaluating the file size limit would be a good idea at this time regardless.

If it is file size you are concerned about, you can always change the format of your avatar. They are so small being hi-def won't do much anyway.

It becomes a problem mostly with animations.

As of this post, WP has 75,457 members. Lets say about 15,000 of them have an avatar (and that's still on the high side, keep in mind that there are plenty of users that only registered and that there are users that use avatars from the site). If every member was using the maximum avatar size of 16kb, that would make a total size of 235mb. That's surprisingly low.

Animated avatars can get out of hand, especially when each frame is at the maximum limit. Not only does this take up server space, but the animations themselves tend to clog the bandwidth and slow down the connection - a great annoyance when you're trying to move quickly between threads and fora.

Yea but... can't we have a little bit more? IIRC these forums opened in 2004 and that was probably the limit back then too. We're 9 years further with WAY faster internet speeds. I remember the days of early 2000's when DSL and cable were most impressive and dail up was common. Good times... good times...

Oh uhm.. as I was saying, increasing it a little bit really shouldn't hurt. I know what you mean with animated avatars. My internet has problems on forums with long animations of 100kb+ per frame(my internet is very slow). But 16 kb? Even doubling this size shouldn't hurt anyone's net unless you're on dailup.

Animated gifs are animated locally by the browser - there is no bandwidth involved other than that required to download the thing in the first place.
That said, the animations can still be a really annoying distraction and worse, flashing a large enough area at certain frequencies can trigger epileptic episodes.

But otherwise, an avatar is just a badge - it functions as a small visual identifier, not an image galley and I wonder what people are missing out on by not having one that's (say) 256x256.
The current size appears large enough to get quite creative, and many people have used photographs with no immediately visible loss of quality so the size seems adequate and works well enough for its intended purpose. There is an overall visual consideration too - a thread is currently a series of posts with small images attached, but I get the impression some might prefer this to be a series of images with small posts attached.

It is a bit annoying - every picture I have got on my computer is too big for the avatar thing, so I can't have an avatar next to my name. And downloading an avatar straight from the internet is too complicated. Nothing is easy these days.

You can scale down one of those images.

Post your avatar here and someone will sort it out.

the cost of bandwidth isn't the issue. It's low so that pages load quickly. Any given forum page has a bunch of images and avatars that add up and can slow down page load

Oh. Thanks, Alex!

Seems I had my facts wrong.

Mark this day on your calendar!

You probably know how to resize a picture that you have on your computer, but maybe others don't.

1. Go to where the picture lives on your computer and right-click on it.
2. Hover over "open with" on the right-click menu and the "Paint" program will likely be one of your choices.
3. When the image has opened in the "Paint" program, there is a menu choice up near the left upper corner that says "resize."
4. You can resize using either "percent" (which is the default) or "pixels" (which for the Avatar needs to be 130 x 160).
5. After you have resized and saved it back onto your computer you can hover over it to verify that the file size is less than 16kb.

Clear as mud?

Last edited by PrncssAlay on 04 May 2013, 8:00 pm, edited 2 times in total.

It’s actually 130 × 160; 160 × 130 won’t be accepted.