Avatar image help requested

Originally posted by FortAnthem
I've used avatars bigger than 75 kb in the past.

Only in the past?

I doubt anyone would bother to check the file size unless someone complained or something.

You never know...

reply to post by ArMaP

Which is why I still am not using it! Ooh the Mods see all.

Originally posted by ArMaP

Originally posted by FortAnthem
I've used avatars bigger than 75 kb in the past.

Only in the past?

Yeah, you got me there but, it seems to me that the size limit is unnecessarily low.

I understand you don't want people's avatars to take up too much bandwidth and slow down the site but, the size limits seem way too low for any good avatars. The T&Cs allow animated avatars but, anyone who follows the rules to the letter won't be able to find one small enough to use. Even some of the non animated images are too big, like this one I used during the Christmas season.

116KB

The allowable sizes for background images are slightly larger even though many members don't even use one. Maybe the size limitation should be a combination of the avatar and background limits to give us more flexibility if we only want to use one or the other.

My current avatar and the Christmas one were well within the size limits for background images but, I prefer the smaller avatar pic with my colored background to a stretched out background image.

I haven't seen any avatars in my time here that slowed down my computer noticeably but, I can't even look at this site when not logged in because all the ads make the pages load so slow.

Sometimes a little optimization is enough.
28 KB

But for animated GIFs is a little more difficult without losing some visual quality.
75 KB

reply to post by ArMaP


I got '___''s avatar down to 93kb. Is there any way to get it slightly lower, into allowable limits without messing it up too much?

Every time I cut down on the size, it seems to make it blink even faster, making it even more annoying.

Here's the original for comparison:

reply to post by FortAnthem

Thanks for your help but I think I should just forget the avatar for now. It's no biggie. I don't like the quicker flashing one either, too irritating.

reply to post by FortAnthem


Unfortunately, images like that are hard to optimize.

Reducing the number of colours is one way of doing it, but as this image has many different shades (the image has 128 different colours), reducing the number of colours makes it look bad.

And it's still too big, 129 KB


Removing frames makes it smaller, but it makes the animation faster or (if we change the duration of each frame) "jumpy".

And it's too big, 165 KB

The only way of reducing the image to less than 75 KB was by applying both methods, but the result doesn't look good.


The compression method used by GIF is not good with images with many shades of one or two colours, it's best at working with large areas of the same colour