[Terry Primos]

Actually, 15MB of web space is a lot. It would most definitely not be a mini-webpage.

I was just checking the stats of the master copy of my website (which is stored on my PC). My site contains about 40 pages of text and images. This covers 5 directories, which collectively contain 112 files. My entire website will fit on a 1.44MB floppy disk.

Back in the early days of the Custom Knife Photography forum, and the CKD Photo of the Week forum, several of us were stressing the importance of learning to optimize digital images for the web. We wanted to help folks learn how to take that 5MB digital image and crunch it down into a web-ready JPEG image of less that 60K.

Nobody wanted to listen. The general concensus was, "But I don't care about web images, I just want to learn to take better photographs". Remember the struggles we had when trying to get people to keep images for the contest under 60K? We heard things like, "It doesn't take that long to display a 100K image, and I am on a slow dialup connection".

The facts were then, and still remain today, that we are using the Internet to share information, and it only makes sense to learn how to use it effectively. Decreasing the amount of bandwidth used is only a part of the equation. That part of the deal is just the polite thing to do for the millions of viewers on the Internet. When it comes to optimization for the sake of storage, we are doing that for ourselves. The better I can optimize my images, the more images I can store on the disk space I am paying for.

If I keep my images at 60K, I can store 200 images in just 12MB of disk space. I might mention that it is EASY to optimize down to 60K. Alex, dogman, and several others have displayed images in the past which were crunched down in the neighborhood of 30K. At that size we could store 400 images in 12MB of disk space.

Look at my banner below. The original one, on my PC, which is the same physical dimensions, but is in the proprietary format of my image editor is a little over 304K. However, the image you are seeing which was made web-ready, is optimized down to about 8K.

By the way Coop, all this rambling is not directed towards you. This is for all to read and absorb. 15MB of disk space is a huge amount.