For someone like me who does a lot of block colours in his pics (see the digital comics gallery for my stuff), the 15kb thumbnail limit is too small. There is no way possible to have a 200x200 pixel thumbnail and still keep it under this size. I've tried now with a couple of my past images as well as my latest one and they only way to do it was to set the image quality in photoshop to 0! - which of course by then produced the crappiest quality jpeg ever seen by man. But what of gif I hear you say???!!...well I tried that and ended up going from a 24kb image to 26kb!! - so no luck there. Can we please raise the size limit to at least 30Kb????....

Hi Sean, What version of Photoshop are you using? In v6 there is a 'Save for Web' option in the 'File' menu, and I just tried that on a randomly chosen image of yours ('Battlechasers - Knolan') which produced a very serviceable jpeg at 40% quality and a file size of 12.1K. Your latest image made a 200 square thumb at 50% quality of 12.64K. Kevin.

Attached Link: Discussion on thumbnail images

Here's a thread in the photography forum also discussing this topic. I hope it may be of use. :-)>

"There is no way possible to have a 200x200 pixel thumbnail and still keep it under this size..." Strange ..we've been doing it at the 3DCommune for over two years now...In fact,we only recently raised it from a 10 k cap to a 15 k cap. Folks just need to learn compression. It's not fair to other who can keep the size down in the interest of fast loading galleries,only to have a few ruin it by not compressing their thumbnails. It's a thumbnail for Gawd sake. Use ACDSee(free) od PhotoShop's save for web feature. Tom

I hope ya don't mind...but I grabbed one of your thumbs and compressed it in Photoshop. I got it down to under 15K with only minimal artifacts.

The image has the settings I used. Pretty default...I am by no means a compression wizard like some folks I know. LOL!

Hope this helps you!

-Em aka. nikitacreed

Attached Link: http://www.pppr.sk/rainbow/

As others have indicated, it's easy to make a good thumb per Renderosity's requirements, which so far as I'm aware, aren't new at all. I've always posted thumbs at under 15kb, including at max allowed resoution of 200x200. I don't use "save for Web," although if I did there would be less guesswork. I start by saving the thumb at JPEG level 8 (talking about Photoshop, obviously,) and if that yields too large a file, try again at 7, etc. A HUGE help, however, is the use of JPEG Cleaner by Rainbow Software. It strips .jpegs of any data which isn't specifically image data. A thumbnail which P'shop saved at 20kb might be reduced to 14.5kb when cleaned. JPEG Cleaner is freeware. Find it at the attached link. As a matter of courtesy and efficiency, it's a good idea to clean your full size images posted here, too.

The other side of this issue is that you have to also think of those of us on dial-up connections. I live in an area of Australia where the phone company only just managed to get our data connection speed up to 31k. ADSL is out of the question as we just don't have the lines for it and satellite connection is about $1200 to install and then about $150 per month to maintain. I really like your work Sean, but when it comes to images that take forever to load, if I don't see something that catches my eye in the first few seconds of loading I just won't wait for the rest. It takes too long.

I use that because I have hassles running p/shop 7 on my laptop - it keeps freezing unexpectedly, so I use my trusty old p/shop 5 mostly and only swap to 7 when I need a special feature. So I guess I will have to save the final jpegs in 7 from now on using the save for web function....

:) Hey guys I have the same problem on my evil macintosh mwaaaaaahaaaaaahaaaaa :) But I understand why it is a 15k limit so I'm still trying :) any other tips on how to get Photoshop Light to do it :) Thnx guys :)

Attached Link: http://www.jpegwizard.com/

Have any of you tried the online jpeg compression sites??? Okay it may not solve all problems or be a long term solution, but it might be worth a try as a temporary "fix." I've given a link for one...I don't necessarily recommend it. I haven't needed this recently (not since trust old Paint Shop Pro upgraded its compression wizard).

WHOOT >:} I got it to work WHEEEEEEHEEEEEEEE >:) just posted to photography gallery :) I forgot also puting pixel size down to 72 also helps at times :) THnx all :)

Try shrinking my lastest to 200x200, at best id get 22k, until i dropped thumbnail to almost no color depth.

If you use gif, yes that'd be right. Use a 65% jpeg though, and it comes down to 13.4k no problem.

who cares, its just a thumbnail. the real work is seen when u click it, and everyone knows that.

Issued ive seen is photoshop reports 14k or even 9k but i exit out and the actuall thumbnail filesize is 22k. Server of course picks up the 22k filesize and rejects it. On a 200x200 pixel thumbnail, that 22k is set for the lowest 1. Not sure why photoshop reports one size and file itself is another. Check out my latest thumbnail... i had to reduce it to gif at 32 color just to get it up.

memory works in 4 kb clusters i believe. If a cluster is used by a piece of info that is 1k, it'll take up 4k in total. One of my folder has about 4 gigs in it, but 4.4 gigs of space are being used.

Heh, I complained about the same thing over at 3DC a while back. I was using PS 5.0 LE, which doesn't have any special web compression feature, and the standard JPG save just didn't cut it. But like Dialyn said, for those of us who can't afford a full copy copy of Photoshop, PSP7 has a great JPG Optimizer, which solved the problem for me perfectly (not to mention being a great app overall). It just so happens that Jasc is offering free downloads of PSP 8 beta right now, so if anyone's interested (and who wouldn't be?), hit their site and nab it while it's up!:)

Photo Impact by Ulead also has optimizer. I have PS4 & do the opt in PI5.