Rules change: longest side and file size for Contest Submission photos

[mnhtnbb]

5. A lot of the distress about longest side is due to the Standard/Classic account setting

which I didn't know was an option until it was pointed out to me. I had always had my account set to standard, so I didn't see
any photos showing up as exceeding the 800 px limit in any of the contests!

Here's how you can see it.


Go to My Account at the top of your screen and left click it.
Under Preferences, look at the second option down "Preferred format for regular web browsers", then look to the right. Click on classic and you
will see your screen layout change and then open any one of the monthly photo contest submission threads. I'll offer the October one--which was the first one I ran--as an example.

http://www.democraticunderground.com/103646992

Photos will then appear in different sizes due to the change in account setting.


If you scroll down the list of submissions for October your eye will easily pick out 9 photos that are larger than the others. If you right click on any photo and select "View Image Info" it will give you the size of the file (KB) and length x width dimensions (px)

If you use photobucket--which I do--you can resize any photo that you have uploaded to photobucket simply by entering the number you want
for either length or width, and it will automatically resize it proportionally. This is not to say that photobucket
isn't difficult at times, and sometimes I have to upload a photo more than once in order to get it to 'save' when resized, but most of the time it
will save the resized photo without a problem. Then you copy & paste the new IMG URL that you saved from resizing the photo. After you've done
it a couple of times it's pretty easy.

The reason I chose 1024 for the longest side is that many photos that haven't been zoomed or cropped a lot will upload at that dimension to photobucket
and won't require resizing. It's really easy to check, though, just by selecting the resize option and it will give you the dimensions of the photo you uploaded.

File size I suspect was an issue back in the day when a lot of DU'er's were dealing with dial-up, and it would take too much time for larger files to display.
I don't think it's such an issue these days, which was why I pushed the file size limit to 675K. In reviewing photos, that was the largest I found that
was displayed with a 1024 px longest side and most of the photos were < 400K. So, really an arbitrary choice, but one that shouldn't require many people to resize photos smaller just because of file size. It's the photos that are very detailed or have lots of different colors to them that have larger file sizes.

I hope this helps explain it. Until someone explained it to me, I didn't realize that lots of photos were being submitted to the contests that didn't meet
the size limitations. And if DU'ers are viewing the photo contests in Classic mode, then some people feel pretty strongly that the larger photos have
an 'edge' when it comes to getting votes.