So-- I would love nothing better than to host every image on Imgur and call it a day, except that Imgur is just *lol* with that business. I.e., in some cases, I have stuff that's been there for ~10yrs with no issue, and then there's a bunch of other stuff that routinely gets deleted after 3-4mos or so.
Not trying to ramble here, but my concern is that I don't want to weigh down our host, and instead want to find the 'right pocket,' i.e. a good-size image file that let's me show off our image content, but isn't a burden upon our host.
Plus of course, sometimes showing off a certain series requires ~10 images or so, meaning the image-serving requirements are 10x the nominal requirement.
In cases like that, I have no problem uploading such content to Imgur, even if it's not going to last long, but... I kinda want to figure out how I should handle these things, if that makes sense...
Thank you for any and all advice.
If all you want is efficient web quality I'd highly recommend grabbing the
cjpeglibinary out of the latest static release from the libjxl repo and using the following command to slim down images with near-zero visual quality loss:cjpegli -q 90 -p 2 "input.jpg" "output.jpg". It uses modern encoding techniques derived from the next-gen JPEG-XL project and stuffs the result back into a regular old JPEG container. Replace "90" with e.g. 90/92/95 depending on the quality level you want to target. After playing around with some of the quality levels and checking the resultant filesizes you should be able to get a feel for what you can reasonably get away with for the resolution and makeup of a particular image. If you still can't get it small enough, you probably need to start reducing the resolution as well.In terms of what size an average image should be for Threadiverse purposes, I'd shoot for 0.5-1MB. If it's just a meme or something with value not intrinsic to its image quality I'd aim lower, whereas if it's something OC like photography I'd bump the quality higher (or maybe have a web-quality version available on click with a higher quality version hosted elsewhere).