Attachment file size limitation and posting your huge maps

[jonkka]

Hi,

I have recently completed my regional map and it's a huge one in terms of size (almost 26 MB in 90% JPEG in full resolution at 9000 x 14000 px).

After experimenting with attachment tool here, I discovered that the limit is around 10MB per attachment. I could downsize the picture but it would lose it's details (it's a gaming map so it's readability is optimized for 100% zoom). I could cut it into three pieces and post those separately. I could post it off-site and just put thumbnail and link here. I could ask higher upload limit for this one time. Which of these alternatives is the one you use regularly, I am pretty sure my map isn't the first one to exceed the limit?

t.j.

[ChickPea]

I would suggest you shrink the map down a little to get it under the file size limit. You can always include a link in your post to an external version so that people can view it full size, if they're interested.

Generally speaking, I find that maps hosted off-site often don't get as many comments as those where the map is posted right in the thread, so I would definitely recommend uploading a smaller version here.

[jonkka]

I would suggest you shrink the map down a little to get it under the file size limit. You can always include a link in your post to an external version so that people can view it full size, if they're interested.

That was my initial idea but resize of that magnitude would mean scaling it down from 9000 px (width) to 5000 px which is 56% of the original (according to my tests this is the scaling needed to bring file size down from 26MB to less than 10MB which seems to be the limit here). At that scale, texts would no longer be readable (down from 12px to 6.5px) and resizing hundreds of text labels is a not an option due to placement issues and drop shadow. Increasing JPEG compression to allow larger scale without affecting file size would result the same, bigger but pixelated and thus unreadable.

Generally speaking, I find that maps hosted off-site often don't get as many comments as those where the map is posted right in the thread, so I would definitely recommend uploading a smaller version here.

That is my assumption as well, though I am lurker and thus not familiar how people view files here. Also worth noting is that file of that size is next to impossible to reasonably view on browser, you either see small fraction of the map at 100% or whole map shrunk to minimap.

Thanks for your comments.