Why is fa down? (click for information...)

[RailRide]

I also was accepted to their gallery on first try, mind you, so please don't assume that I'm someone who tried to submit smudged up scrap art because that is not the case in the least.

Not casting judgement on what you submitted (or anything else you said) , since I never saw the thread (and I'm not an assessor anyway). I can only report on what I observe, and almost all of the new applicant threads I peek at that show more than 4 or so responses (i.e. most of them) invariably have presentation issues that prove the applicant had not read the instructions, or at least dismissed them out of hand.

I got attacked for file sizes (which I can understand if they were massive, but they were all 150 KB or less), and was forced to downgrade them to a quality that left certain areas completely in pixels. That was my biggest beef with them. I also was attacked for inked-only art that fully completed, not scrap art, and which I spent plenty of time on. Because I preferred it to be black and white one of the admins was very unhappy and made a point to make slurs about that piece of art, which I didn't understand after having several friends that uploaded black and white art.

About the only suggestion one can make about finished B/W linework is to save it as a GIF if the submitter did it as a JPG. If what you described is accurate, then the individul assessor is in the wrong (two of the pieces I applied with were B/W brush-inked lineart, IIRC). It's not the site's policy to treat applicants like that, and I would have brought it to Chmarr's attention.

As for compression, again I can't comment on what you applied with since I never saw them, but what I've observed (at least fairly recently) is the assessor should have provided an example of how much more the image could be compressed. If the example is unacceptably compromised, you can dispute his/her judgement call. After all, there is a formalized exemption for works where detail warrants a large filesize, but generally in the application process they want to see that you know how to compress images, not that you should butcher every piece you put up after you're approved . (Personally, with FA I made a point of bypassing artists who consistently post extra-large images, and plan to keep doing so just on principle, even though I now have DSL.)

As for the freedom aspect, time will tell. It's been my observation that places that have been around a long time tend to become less freewheeling as the years go by, if only because situations crop up over time that become problematic and had to be addressed. And no, I don't consider VCL to be the end-all be-all of online galleries--I happen to have a FA account (for its comment features) and plan to reactivate it when the site returns.

---PCJ

 

[Dragoneer]

Personally, with FA I made a point of bypassing artists who consistently post extra-large images, and plan to keep doing so just on principle, even though I now have DSL.)

FA still needs to discuss rules for large file sizes. Personally, I think no image should EVER be larger than 1280 pixels in any direction, but it's debatable. It is something we need to discuss.

 

[Turbine_Divinity]

Yeah, 1280 is completely insane for the web. Professional illustrators' online portfolios are not nearly that large, nobody on FA should be putting up anything that crazy either. It's outside of the scope of the gallery, if you really want to make a gigantic print-quality image available, host it somewhere else and provide a link, ya know? Even unwieldly panorama images can be broken down into parts of a triptych or whatnot.

 

[furry]

I'm more concerned about file weight than dimentions.

A comic strip might have an unusually large height or something.
But no picture should reach the megabyte under any circumstances.

Users should be able to define weight or size over which FA would display a warning for size.

And people submitting their stupid pencil sketches on lined paper in 2400x3600 24bit PNG should be banned, too!

 

[Vlcice]

Personally, with FA I made a point of bypassing artists who consistently post extra-large images, and plan to keep doing so just on principle, even though I now have DSL.)

FA still needs to discuss rules for large file sizes. Personally, I think no image should EVER be larger than 1280 pixels in any direction, but it's debatable. It is something we need to discuss.

Desktop wallpapers, at least for people with very high resolutions, could be over 1280. (Not that I can understand how people can deal with those resolutions, myself. ^.^; Mine is 1280x854, and that's really enough for me. Any more than that and I'll need my glasses to see a screen two feet in front of me.)

For other art, though, 1280 does seem a more than reasonable limit.

 

[Dragoneer]

I'm more concerned about file weight than dimentions.

A comic strip might have an unusually large height or something.
But no picture should reach the megabyte under any circumstances.

Users should be able to define weight or size over which FA would display a warning for size.

And people submitting their stupid pencil sketches on lined paper in 2400x3600 24bit PNG should be banned, too!

Well, in Ask Fender we'll have a section about understanding and using compression, what to use, etc. An FA admin can reupload the file for the user if he has a better compressed version, really, that doesn't degrade quality.

The greater problem with having a general rule of compression is it doesn't take file sizes into account. So, a 1280x1280 image at 300K... isn't really bad, while a 700x450 image at 300K is badly, badly compressed.