yow..what a world. I live in the boonies in NC (nearest town is 6 miles away), and I have DSL (granted, I'm not happy with them, but that's a long story). There is also the option of Satellite modems, though the agent told us the limit was 2 computers, and upload speeds were about 10% of download speeds. I imagine your real problem is price; I pay beacoup bucks for it.

You guys have been real nice... a lot of threads treat dial-up users with a pretty rough "you get what you deserve" attitude even though broadband isn't even available every where and some people can't afford it in any case. I have not sensed a trace of that attitude in this thread which is something I appreciate. As far as I can tell the reason for the lack of attitude about the subject this time is that it was politely brought up. The last time as I recall it started with a demand from a dial-up user and that's why so little sympathy for the limits of dial-up was offered. You get out what you put in I suppose. Balancing the the quality of the design and the amount of user-friendlyness is a tricky thing. There are limits on both ends and it's sometimes hard to know how to hit the middle of the spectrum to satisfy the most ppl. I prefer to be on the high side toward more quality since the leading edge of what's available to ppl is always growing so more are able to handle the demands.

I used IrfanView and got the image to 26.5kb's. As for dial-up users, i fully remember using Dial-Up myself and looking at the galleries here at Rosity and only looking at the smaller file sizes, Since i have joined Satan in using ADSL i seam to have lost sight and only bothered to compress my images to the maximum that Rosity allow... Why? because after a while you forget that others are still in that sinking boat that you left and settle back to a nice brandy in the comfort of your beach hut...(lol) Sorry i shall in future look out of my beach hut at the boat and remember those Dial-Up users... Lastly... IrfanView is Awesome, i have used it for so many years, i think it should be intergrated into windows, How the hell does everyone look at multiple file formats in one folder(and listen to)???? do they keep changing ap's?

I can't think of any reason to have a 500Kb .jpg for web viewing. For print, well, maybe (I never use .jpg for print), and for other file formats (.tif, .bmp, etc.), sure, but a 500K+ .jpg is just slothfulness, IMHO. bonni

I don't think any of my animate globes have even been that large. I do my best to compress to the maximum that I can without losing image quality. I think it's just courteous to those who have older computers as well as those who don't have DSL. As hard as it is to phathom, not everyone can afford the monthly fee of DSL, and some who can, don't have access to it where they live.

As to another aspect of compressing pics for the web: Preserving your control of the image from image thieves. If you tend to put up large dimensioned, high-quality pics, they get stolen faster (or bandwidth-robbed) more than the smaller, lower-quality pics. Do you want to see that beauty of a VIATWAS you just spent three weeks on plastered all over the net with someone else's name slapped on it? The net should be a place to display your work, yes, but not a place where it can be stolen easily.

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

Interactive JPEG Optimizer-free and seems to work well. I have a client who was going to pay for my DSL connection but in my benighted neighborhood of my 200,000+ city, it isn't available yet! I sympathize with both sides here. I haven't seen any stats but I suspect that the proliferation of high speed connections and large monitors has yet to reach a lot of people. As long as you don't insist on maxing out your images and then complain about lack of hits that's cool. I agree that jpeg2000 is the best overall solution. Wouldn't Rendo have to support it first or can you just upload pcx, psd or whatever you please?

I use "Save for web" in Photoshop. Downsizing the image from 3200x2400 to 1600x1200 and jpeg quality of 50-60% - and that leaves my images in the 450-500 Kb range. Yes, they're big. I like to do multi-figure scenes, with interaction between many characters and a detailed setting. They don't compress well. I'm not going to reduce the quality any further, at 50% too many details are lost already. And I'm not going to reduce dimensions either, at 1600x1200 the expressions are still visible, at 800x600 they would be completely lost. If you're a dialup user, have you considered satellite? Won't help you any with uploads, but downloads are blazingly fast - usually much faster than DSL or cable.

1600x1200 Wow! No matter how quickly it downloaded, I'd be scrolling for days. Personally, an image that size is just too big to really enjoy unless you have at least a 20+ inch screen. I saw a survey a while back that said the majority of people use 1024x768 so it's either shrink or scroll. Scrolling tends to reduce the continuity of the image IMO. I'm nor sure if the browser's zoom out function yields the same result as having the original smaller. Each to their own. If you have the bandwidth and the screen real estate I'm sure it's great. The vast majority of images on the internet seem to adhere to the 1024x768 maximum size. I imagine that may gradually change as more people get huge plasma displays or something.

What you have to understand is that people who have been using Photoshop for awhile, usually pick better compressions to minimize compression flaws in the image. The more you take it down, the more artifacts will appear and it will make the image look terrible. My screen Resolutions are smaller (typically 780X585), and even still on the lowest compression setting I can go without getting compression flaws, they range from 300 to 500 kb (the latter being the limit rendo allows) Also keep in mind color has alot to do with that too. For some reason, Reds and Golds tend to make it even harder to compress things, as they result in a bigger file size.