signature question:

[artdutra04]

Originally Posted by lukevanoort

Just a note, saving a .gif file as a .jpg will not necessarily make it smaller, in fact it can make it quite a bit larger. If your image is uses a lot of blocks of a few colours (like most logos) it is probably better off as a .gif, if it is a real picture or similar, .jpg will be smaller.

Actually, in the case that you mention there, saving the image as a .png would be even better.

Unless you need animation or you need transparency that works in IE6, anything else that you'd save as a .gif would be better suited as a .png, especially if you want to get the smallest possible file size without compromising quality.

And 880kb for a signature image? Even with my high speed internet, I'd stand strongly against doing that. One of the general "rules" of web design is that the total size of every object on any given page (including HTML, CSS, Javascript, and images) shouldn't really exceed much past 100kb. That's why I keep all the images in my signature as small as possible.

[whytheheckme]

Yeah, that GIF is 855 kB... Which I didn't notice on my 6Mb connection at home, but when I was connected on my cell (on a 1X tower, not an EVDO tower), and cleared my cache, I noticed the time it took to load (the 1X CDMA connection simulates about 1.5x that of dialup).

So I would definitely use something to shrink down that image (either in physical pixel size, or reducing the number of frames.... or something.)

Jacob

[cbale2000]

If you have access to a program like Adobe Imageready, you can go in and see all of the frames in the animation window. If you need to make it smaller, you can just take out every other frame, it should cut the size in half without loosing much quality (depending on the original framerate of course). You can also use it to resize the image while leaving the animation intact, which is another good way to cut back on file size.

I should probably make my animated sig smaller too, I haven't checked the size (can't see it at school, as they block Imageshack) but I'm sure it's up there.



Oh, one more thing... it's really just personal preference but I would reccomend using Imageshack over Photobucket. You don't need to register (though it's free if you want to keep track of your images); you get nearly unlimited image bandwith unlike Photobucket which is VERY limited; you can upload images up to 1.5mb in size; and there is no limit on how many images you can upload.

Just throwing that out there.

[tseres]

thanks man, the imageready did what i needed

[Kelly]

As a caveat to everyone reading this thread, large and/or animated signatures get really annoying really fast when I'm trying to read through a thread quickly.