size limit of jpg attachments

[Dave Hicks]

A large part of the reason for having a limit on jpg sizes is to discourage uploading images straight out of a camera. If you load it up in an image editor, you can straighten, crop, improve contrast and color balance, resize and save at a reasonable compression ratio and typically you get a picture that looks better and takes about 3-10% of the space of the original. That in turn means you can attach way more images before you run up against your total attachment quota.

For example, I just grabbed your (Don's) 488K cubes picture (I had that puzzle too) and denoised, resized to about 900 pixels wide, sharpened, brightened, and saved it at a quality level that looked great to me and it came out at 23K. You might have disagreed on my exact choices of size and brightness, but it gives you an idea of what can be done. (Assuming the goal was just to show people what the puzzle was, I resized it further to 250 pixels wide, turned up the jpeg compression, and could get it under 2K!)

By the way, the forum software says our average attachment size is 99KB and our largest attachments are all PDF files. I'm not going to name names but the forum software says our 5 most popular attachments are all images in the 11K-19K range.

I don’t know anything about what you can do or can't do on a Chromebook though. I do see that GIMP appears to be available! I would expect that to be decent at least.