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How large should images be in the Geminispace? On the WWW, I would just link to photos straight from my phone, but those files can approach 5 MB. Does anyone have a soft mental limit of, say, 1 MB? Or smaller? 5 MB is probably overkill; I may go smoller, but I don't know that I want to be smaller.
Mar 24 · 8 weeks ago
Can't speak for everyone, but many of us are minimalists and still care about kilobytes... BBS here has a 100KB limit on pix, which takes a bit of GIMP effort but is surprisingly decent -- check the photography forum.
On the other hand, solderpunk's (questionable imho) choice to encrypt with SSL implies the use of pretty modern equipment with gigs of RAM, so technically anything goes.
Oh, keep in mind that there is no way to determine file size in Gemini other than downloading the entire file. I would suggest explicitly stating the size if you do go into megabytes, to be polite.
That's a good point. I have written a very smol gemtext preprocessor, and having it find link lines that are images and append the size seems like an obvious thing to add.
Thanks for this reminder. I have some binaries for lost gemstone design software in my capsule. No more than 2MB, but it’s worth warning people.
There are people out there doing gemini and small web over packet radio.
Depends on why the image is there. If it's not something you usually need in best possible resolution (I dunno, NASA image sources, good photography, wallpapers…) I’d prefer files that are no more than 1 long MB, preferably less. Try converting them into webp or jpegxl and see how that goes, I guess.
On the point of modern hardware needs for Gemini, I do some of my browsing on a Amiga 500 with a 68020 28MHz processor and 9MByte ram and it is usable. Slow for sure, about 8 seconds for the TLS handshake to this site. That is quite good for a home computer from about 1990.
My point is that Gemini can be used on quite old hardware.
@algebra also there is a data url scheme (RFC 2397) that allows including images directly in the gempage, given the image itself is small. I have seen this used as a preview accompanied with a link to a full scale picture. My browser do recognize them and shows right away.
Thanks for letting me know about JPEG XL. I tested it a little bit, and it seems like a c. 15% reduction in size, so it's something, but not huge. OTOH, if I publish an image in JXL, I doubt someone on an Amiga will be able to view it, but maybe he's not going to view images anyway.
Does any operating system or Gemini browsers support JPEG XL?
On the Amiga it really depends on your setup what size of images you can show. On a unexpanded Amiga 500 you can view 640x480 NTSC or 640x512 PAL in 16 colors.
A popular addon for Amiga 500 is the PiStorm whch gives, among other things, a graphics card that can run full HD at 24/32 bitdepth.
Aren’t a lot of the older systems using text only browsers or Gemini over SSH? I do Gemini over SSH on MacOS9. Won’t be getting any images there unless I download them.
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