Hi Alan,

Thanks, I'm very glad you are enjoying the site. It is nice to have Scamp Owners International on the web now.

I'm glad you asked this question right off the bat, because pictures are what all forums and online sites are struggling with and trying to accommodate. Let me first lay out the issues with digital photography that website owners contend with and I won't go into too much detail but try and present an overview.

1. Everything that is added to a website whether it is content, pages, slideshows, digital imagery, etc. has a cost associated with it. All of this requires storage on the hosting platform, and bandwidth to display to each user. Both of these items have an associated $$ cost.
2. Normal content, pages, text and occasional pic with the content doesn't consume much storage or bandwidth.
3. Digital picture upload if not restrained can wipe out both storage and bandwidth in a very short time. Most people don't understand how to adjust the settings on the new digital cameras and the defaults, if left on, yield photos that exceed 4+ MB for each photo taken which is astronomical in terms of storage and bandwidth required to display a set of 10 4MB+ photos that are uploaded. 90% of digital camera users have no need for 4MB+ photos in their daily lives, I have my cameras set to yield pictures at about 600K and change it based on what I'm needing at the time.
4. In the website world to balance display quality, storage - bandwidth issues, and end user experience all forums generally try to keep uploaded pictures to a 250k or less limit. This provides ability to keep storage and bandwidth affordable and provide a good user experience to visitors with a balance of picture quality vs time to download the pictures on a thread.  Occasionally, you run across a site that allows larger, but you will see that 5 photos on a post take over a minute to complete loading on your screen. They don't pop up, but slowly load from the top to bottom for each one. Large venues like Facebook, Google, Craigslist etc. usually limit and resize photo uploads to 50k or less, so smaller forums usually have better size limitations. However, none of us have 100 million visitors and thousand of website developers on staff to deal with these issues.
5. Then there is the sideways issue that has surfaced in the last few years due to primarily Apple products stripping or formatting the EXIF information on the photos and they upload sideways or upside down. Very few people understand how to edit and manage their digital pictures in order to prevent that from happening and not send their relatives an email containing attached pictures that exceed 30MB, sideways photos, or upload them like that to an online venue.

The above is a simplified overview of what all website venues are dealing with in terms of digital picture upload and you don't want to know the costs associated with allowing uploads of large photos, not to mention degrading the user experience on the website.

I'll cover in part 2 what is already in place at SOI and Fiberglass-RV-4sale that helps balance the picture dance and what we'll be doing over the next few months to try and enhance the picture capabilities.