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Posted by: tau Sep 17 2021, 03:07 PM

Sol 203 Mastcam-Z right eye panorama with enhanced colors

I just found out that in addition to the file size limit for uploading images, there also seems to exist a limit to the total number of pixels in an image.
When I try to upload images with a file size of less than 3 MB but with more than or close to 25 million pixels, the attachment management menu disappears.
So I had to reduce the size (and hence resolution) of the above image to 92% (linear).

Did anybody make a similar observation?

Posted by: Bill Harris Sep 17 2021, 04:42 PM

Good point, Tau. I recall that there are file size and image size limits, but I so rarely approach either limit that don't recall much in the way of details. I think they go to the days when many people were on Dialup.
Probably the best thing to do is to ask in "Forum Guide" at the top of the page.

--Bill

Posted by: djellison Sep 17 2021, 08:08 PM

The original limits ( significantly smaller than they are now ) were put in place to dissuade people from using UMSF as a place to host content, and encourage people to use image hosting services like flickr etc etc.

Paying for hosting of and backing up a large image repository also has time/bandwidth costs.

I've not been a UMSF admin for getting on for a decade so I have no idea what the total hosted content size is on UMSF, what the current server's specs are, or what, if any, steps are taken today to secure that data. Backing up the attachments was many gigabytes in 2010.

I would continue to encourage people to put their content elsewhere and use UMSF as a place to discuss content, not host it.

Posted by: fredk Sep 17 2021, 09:22 PM

That all makes sense for large files - we can't expect UMSF to be a large image hosting site.

But looking at old threads here very many images have been (presumably) lost because they were posted to hosting sites that no longer exist (anyone remember imagehost.org or uploadimages.net?). It's a shame we can't see what some people here did in the exciting early days of missions with immediate public release policies. So posting smaller images (within whatever upload limit is set) to UMSF makes sense with the historical context in mind.

Posted by: ngunn Sep 17 2021, 09:55 PM

I second that from fredk. I appreciate the long term value of content posted here which doesn't disappear.

Posted by: john_s Sep 17 2021, 10:03 PM

Thirded! There’s great history here

Posted by: Cherurbino Sep 18 2021, 09:43 AM

Dear djellison, if you consider my proposal valuable, you may create the special topic 'How to store your attachments in the „Wayback”' and move it there. Although I decided not to post at this forum anymore, I shall make an exclusion to answer there the colleagues' questions upon Wayback, if any.
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1. By strange contra-coincidence, this summer the moderator of the 'nasaspaceflight' forum shocked me with the opposite requirement: not to 'hotlink' images (they call it embedding "Do not embed images") from the third sites, but to upload them directly at their host. Moreover, mr. 'zubenelgenubi' personally reloaded many pictures from my posts into the NSF attachments - see https://forum.nasaspaceflight.com/index.php?topic=45676.msg2265531#msg2265531. However I would not recommend anybody the NSF as a storage facility: forums are not eternal and forum policies change even more frequently.


2. My personal 'storage' is Wikipedia where I https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Cherurbino for >11 years. I also https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special:ListFiles/Cherurbino&ilshowall=1 there (do not laugh at my ugly martian panoramas' compilations) and I'm sure in the relative eternity of this storage. However I shall never recommend Wikipedia to anybody who is concerned about his copyright. All original work uploaded there automatically receives a 'common license' which prohibits you to refer to this content as to the work of your own. Thus, if (for example) Phil Stooke whose maps are admired all over the Solar system uploads one of his maps to Wiki, he loses the right to refer to it as "map of Phil Stooke" in his future book. So be careful: "the free cheese may be found only in the mousetrap".

3. A good solution could be the 'Wayback' - the world internet archive, www.archive.org. It is more eternal than Wikipedia, since the last is not free from anonymous volunteers who may nominate your image for deletion. I did not try this tool on the USF, but let's do it together:

When the entire forum page is full, query its address at the archive.org. Let it be page 12 of the http://www.unmannedspaceflight.com/index.php?showforum=80.
Syntax for the query is: [https://web.archive.org/*/] [URL of the page queried]. Thus, for we get query like this:



Put this string into address bar with "paste+go". This page was not archived, thus my first steps there were like this



After passing these (and some other) steps this page is already at the Wayback. Its address there is (note two 'htpps' inside; it's normal):

https://web.archive.org/web/20210918065336/http://www.unmannedspaceflight.com/index.php?showtopic=8600&st=165

However this is not all. You've archived only thumbnails, not the attachments! Continue your archiving job.

To start archiving attachments you must open them, one by one with the right-click in new window. At this step you must be attentive: 'Wayback' shall automatically propose you addresses which include session tokens (syntax 's=' + [32 characters] + '&')

This address includes a token:


Clear it (s=efde22aa3ef9e1afe1a9b658cdbf22f7&) to make address look like this:

Only in this case each new user shall be able to open the full-sized attachment. I did that, so thanks for my efforts at least two maps from here shall be kept at the Wayback forever until it disappears. They are:

by Andreas Plesh: https://web.archive.org/web/20210918065717if_/http://www.unmannedspaceflight.com/index.php?act=attach&type=post&id=49195

by Phil Stooke: https://web.archive.org/web/20210918070443if_/http://www.unmannedspaceflight.com/index.php?act=attach&type=post&id=49206

I said that 'Wayback' could be the solution for the hosting of attachments because now it is not. Hypothetically, everybody could make the following.

1. Temporarily upload their attachments here.
2. As soon as the page with attachments is full (this disclaimer is to prevent Wayback from overloading with multiple copies of unfinished pages), store it at the Wayback.
3. Insert the archived attachment into the post with the [img] tag...

Halt!

This forum does not dispaly wide images (that's why I had to use the 'URL' tag), and at the same time its "IP.Board" engine (or inner admin settings?) ignore the " width=" parameter of the "img" tag ([img width=]).

Meanwhile this option is available at NSF (it runs on SMF 2.0.15) - I've just checked: all images from Wayback are visible, resizable and back-clickable to their original size from the pages of that forum (and others runnung SMF forum soft).

Conclusions
1. Storing your forum uploads at the Wayback is always necessary. Do that before something undesirable may happen.
2. Wayback does not delete the stored images, even if they are subsequently deleted at the source, or even if the whole forum 'disappears'.
3. Condition (2) could release the forum quota at the host server from a burden of uploads (algorithm: 'attach - store - link to the stored image - delete the attachment'). But to make this workaround available, forum settings must allow forum members to use the image resizing parameter in the IMG css/bb tag.

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P.S. This page is also stored at Wayback: https://web.archive.org/web/20210918094848/http://www.unmannedspaceflight.com/index.php?showtopic=8625&st=600

Posted by: nprev Sep 18 2021, 10:25 PM

Hey, all. A member requested that we start a separate thread for this since it's overrunning the current Perseverance transit thread, so moving those posts over here.

There are some good ideas in here, and Doug Ellison has explained the reasons for current UMSF policy. There MAY be some changes coming down the road, but that will be entirely dependent on a number of factors re site hosting that have not yet been resolved with TPS. With that in mind, please proceed....

Posted by: Hungry4info Sep 18 2021, 11:40 PM

There have been times that I have spent a couple hours "reliving" some missions. Huygens' landing on Titan. Hayabusa (1)'s exploration of Itokawa. New Horizons' flyby of Pluto. Many others that this forum has been around for its members to see and share the excitement and amazement of these events. I fully agree that the history contained on this site is amazing, and it's a real treasure for re-living fond memories for which this very board was integral to forming.

Posted by: Bill Harris Sep 19 2021, 12:00 AM

Agreed! The historical aspect of discussions of events and missions is practically a 'national treasure'. And a good argument for why some form of UMSF/Planetary Society storage of some level of images is advantageous. For example, I just edited my Signature to eliminate reference to Photobucket, which hasn't existed in over 10.years!

--Bill

Posted by: djellison Sep 19 2021, 03:40 AM

Yup. This.

Posted by: mcaplinger Sep 19 2021, 06:27 AM

Obviously nobody should expect anything posted here (or anywhere for that matter) to last forever, but this and every other forum I use is riddled with dead links to defunct photo-hosting sites. I find it hard to believe that with storage prices as low as they are, this site can't afford to store reasonably-sized images. I agree that there should be a size limit, but the current 3 MB limit seems a little low in 2021.

Posted by: Ant103 Sep 19 2021, 08:35 AM

That's why I'm self hosting my content since 2005. I don't trust Flickr, or any image hosting service for a long term hosting.

Posted by: Cherurbino Sep 19 2021, 11:51 AM

The 'Wayback' world internet archive (see above) is the last resort in such cases. Query the address of the page with 'dead images' at 'archive.org', there's a small chance that somebody has archived it before.

Some popular pages are backuped dozens, hundreds of times: use a timeline above the Wayback's archive page to scroll deep into its history.

Posted by: mcaplinger Sep 19 2021, 04:41 PM

I'm a big fan of the Wayback Machine, but it has plenty of gaps and lacunae, and I'm not convinced that the Internet Archive is a better longer-term hosting solution than any other alternative.

For very large image products, certainly people should host however they wish, but it seems silly to require that for every single image, especially modestly-sized ones.

Posted by: djellison Sep 19 2021, 07:24 PM

During my tenure running this place ( long since gone ) money was never the issue.

It was finding the kind of sys admin / web dev support necessary to keep the server up to date, keep the forum software patched, keep backups properly. My hope was that when I gave the keys to TPS, that would be looked after.

The fact that this place went entirely dark in July for a day or so was because there was basically nobody running the place.

The forum should have had it's name changed to include inclusive language half a decade+ ago. It's still not happened. For the same reason.

This isn't my forum any more - hasn't been for a very long time - so it's not really my place to criticize how it is or isn't being run - but I wouldn't trust this as a place to host content I cared about in the medium to long term.

Posted by: Cherurbino Sep 23 2021, 06:33 AM

The main technical problem on the way of encouraging everybody to use the third parties' image hosting facilities lays in the impossibility to use the trivial 'width=' parameter of the IMG html tag.

Recently I observed here (cannot find this post now) the attempt to display the color photo of Ingenuity's RTE at a full size of the Sony IMX214 matrix (4208×3120).
* the good thing was that our colleague used the IMG tag instead of uploading extra 25-26 megs on your server
* the bad thing was that he could not reduce its dispaly size with '[img width=800]' parameter like is recommended on another forums (some of them apply a script patch to perform it automatically on all large images)
I see here lots of large images from SUPERCAM, WATSON etc. which are not post-processed by members. They are reposted here only for information/discussion purposes, thus there's no obstacle to link to these images in this way

(all images linked with such a syntax are usually back-resizable on a mouseclick for viewing)



I was ready to help you finding such a patch, but the link to http://www.invisionboard.com/ from the 'copyright' section of the forum page («Powered By IP.Board © 2021 IPS, Inc.») seems to be dead.

Posted by: fredk Sep 23 2021, 02:16 PM

If you want to display a large image hosted elsewhere, reducing the image with the width attribute is not efficient, since the browser still needs to download the full-resolution image before rescaling it for display.

Much better is to instead display a lower-res or thumbnail version (which are usually available on the jpl image servers) and make it a link to the full-res image. Or if no thumbnail is available create your own, hosted on UMSF, and again make it a link to the full-res image.

Posted by: Cherurbino Sep 24 2021, 10:00 AM

It's true, but I'm worried about the forum's quota on the hosting server, not about the download time.



Testing the sample syntax of nested links with one of the latest images for sol 211. This image responds as a clickable thumbnail:

https://mars.nasa.gov/mars2020-raw-images/pub/ods/surface/sol/00211/ids/edr/browse/zcam/ZR0_0211_0685688350_098EBY_N0072050ZCAM08246_1100LMJ01_1200.jpg

The large image is opened with the click on the thumbnail in a separate window.

This soultion is applicable to all images from NASA storage, since we beleive it shall not disappear or change URL's. But as for the other hosts, this problem is still open - they tend to disappear after a few years.

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Some image hosts allow to create the thumbnail automatically and store it alongside with the original image.