Signature File Size


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I suppose 50kb is OK, but it would be nice to have more for .png quality.

Perhaps there could be an option for the viewing members to not show signatures above 50 kb, if they did not want to wait ... ?

I don't know how technical that would be to bulid into the Neowin forum.

One thing I'd like to see is to allow ONE small line of text below a normal limit signature.

That surely wouldn't cause a big slowdown of the web pages. :huh:

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I turned off sig viewing a long time ago because I thought they were too big.

Why do you need images in a sig at all, anyways?

You already have an avatar to express yourself in an image.

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You just have to Optimize them correctly and/or use some tricks to get them down in size.

For starters in Photoshop save for Web, try PNG-8, believe it or not sometimes that is fine.

Solid Colors use GIF, even if you use gradients and do not have many colors and GIF may work. Just have to experiment.

Like for the OP's problems, You can technically have 5 images, 4 of which being the outside borders which would be PNG's so you can have the transparency and the inside being the JPEG. Here is an example of how to do the borders (that I also made a GIF so it was only 1.85k as opposed to a Medium JPeg that was 5k)

post-34384-1225983752.gif

We just are not in the age where every single person uses broadband yet, not even close, so although most regulars do, others do not.

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it's hard to compress PNG files

But I agree with the rule changes to 100kb. Those rules were set in 2002, and who actually uses dialup anymore?

It's slow to compress a PNG file, not hard, there are tools like pngcrush that will brute force compression methods to find the smallest possible file sizes, as well as removing un-needed chunks.

First convert your signature into sRGB using whatever tool you're using, then use pngcrush to remove all the un-needed chunks (like the chunks saying it's sRGB, you only need them if they aren't sRGB), and brute force the compression. You'll get great file-size reductions.

Ideally browsers would support JNG (JPEG in a PNG wrapper), as that provides JPEG quality, with PNG alpha support. But support for JNG is non-existent at the moment.

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I just seen dirtylarry's idea, and am willing to try that. It would cut down on file sizes, but increase the amount of files I use.

It will all be worth it to have a nice signature :)

Ultimately, it may not work in my situation, since I designed a PHP signature, that I can change from a drop down menu. However I will try to find a solution.

I think PNGCrush will be the best solution for me at this time.

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My signature's 65kb. I've tried using pngcrush, but it didn't shrink it at all (I tested it by compressing another PNG and that did work).

I'll try looking at the methods mentioned to try and compress it a little.

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LIAR!

63kb:

Ah yeah, I managed to get it to 63kb a little while after I made that post. But what I did was imported it in Photoshop and saved it as PNG-24 through Save For Web & Devices, and then use pngcrush to get it to that size. It didn't work before I did that.

By the way, your .bat script didn't work for me, and I followed the instructions correctly. It created the 'crushed' directory, but every PNG I tried crushing, it said it couldn't be compressed any more, so it didn't crush them (I tried it with different .png images). It successfully crushed the images though when I typed pngcrush.exe -e 2.png "image.png" for each one.

Honestly that looks horrible lol.

I agree :p Thanks for trying though Gary7 ;)

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I just seen dirtylarry's idea, and am willing to try that. It would cut down on file sizes, but increase the amount of files I use.

It will all be worth it to have a nice signature :)

Ultimately, it may not work in my situation, since I designed a PHP signature, that I can change from a drop down menu. However I will try to find a solution.

I think PNGCrush will be the best solution for me at this time.

Should work fine....have the static png's with the drop shadow surrounding (but without any of the sigs content in it, and then have the php one in the middle.

eg:

[img=example.org/sig/top.png]
[img=example.org/sig/left.png]  [img=example.org/sig/main.php]  [img=example.org/sig/right.png]
[img=example.org/sig/bottom.png]

I see no reason why it wouldn't work.

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