If you are reading this, either you've at one time experienced the 50K limit, or you were directed here via a friendly link.

The 50K limit was put into place after it was realized that the forum was going to be very image intensive. Our hobby relies on pictures of awards, award documents, uniforms, flags, badges, etc..as the basis for topics of discussion. The images take up space on the server that the website resides on. Each year, a significant amount of server space has to be allotted for the growth of the forum, and to keep these images online. Once they are part of the forum, they never go away. The 50K limit was put into place simply to make us a little more selective in our image posting habits. Before posting, members are encouraged to read through all the image posting FAQ's. There's some very helpful tips on how to get the most out of the 50K limit.

This small FAQ will explain how to selectively crop your images so that you can include more important detail into your images, while eliminating information that contributes little or nothing to your images.

The original image. Note all the area around the award. This is dead space. It contributes nothing to what we want to show, which is the award.

Dead Space. We want our final image to have 100% of the space dedicated to what really matters, our award. The diagonal stripes indicate the area we are going to crop and delete.

Many members wonder why we ask that they upload images rather than provide a link to them. The answer is that links eventually expire. Perhaps a member loses interest in awards and moves on, letting the FTP account expire, or perhaps they do some housecleaning on their account and delete a whole bunch of images completely forgetting an image is linked to the forum. Or perhaps they post a link to an image on another website (this is called HOTLINKING and is not allowed). Whatever reason, what will happen is that when someone views the message, if the image file is not there they will get an error message saying something similar to "ERROR FILE NOT FOUND". Thus, we want all images to be uploaded onto the forum so they will be here forever which will keep the message intact.

Many times when you click on a link to view a picture in the forum, the image that is displayed is "shrunk" to display the entire image within your browser window. The shrunk image looks terrible and if you are unaware of this you will scratch your head and think to yourself "wow..that looks horrible"..It's easy to see if a larger image is available to view. After clicking on the link to display the image, simply move your mousepointer to the upper left corner of the image and wait a few seconds. If a larger image is available, you will see a button at the lower right corner.

Getting large. Browsers do their best to display an image within their window regardless of how big the original is. This can be confusing if someone posts a really nice image that is larger than the browser window.

There are many software packages available that are either free or allow you to legally use them while you test all the features. I recommend going to a well-known source such as www.tucows.com When you go to tucows.com, click in the search box and type in "image compression" scroll through all the applications and look for one that appeals to you.