Is the avatar size really a hard limit ?

[doppler]

I can squeeze down some really nice gif animation, but the size limit of 1mb is hard to look good.

Can a compromise of some other larger size be made ? Maybe 2mb ?
Fast broadband is the norm now, 56K is long since not the standard anymore.

 

[BzzBzz]

Why do you need 300x300 avatar if it will get scaled down to 100x100 by forum?

If you make it 100x100 why do you need more than 1 MB? Do you want to make 5 minutes animation?

 

[Teasday]

_{@doppler posted:}

Fast broadband is the norm now, 56K is long since not the standard anymore.

Over half our users are on mobile

 

[doppler]

@Teasday
I know cellphone internet speeds kinda suck. But the USA FCC considers it to be broadband.
How backwards is the USA, charge a lot for slowness. 50%+ mobile, that's a big number.
Maybe 5G will be a blessing. If it happens.

@BzzBzz
My present avatar started out at 6mb, trimmed, cropped & reduced down to 968K. That animation
is 28 panels. The original looks great, the cut down looks so-so. It's not the X by Y that's
important. It's the color depth. A 2 color animation is way smaller than a 32k depth. I have
another that I would love to post (avatar). It starts at 40MB, it runs for 5 seconds and looks
even better. It's a 3 sequence action, with many panels. I may have to cut it apart. Only
2 of the sequences are important.

The saving grace is because this is viewed in a browser. The cache needs only to be loaded once.
Thier after pulled from cache.

 

[BzzBzz]

Ok first let's decide what is your purpose... Are you creating avatar for forum or filming 4kx60 movie?

Is it movie? Wrong place then.

Is it avatar? Learn to optimize.
You do NOT need 300x300 image if it will get downscaled to 100x100 anyway. (yes, X by Y does matter).
Make it 5-7 frames. 28 frames for 1 sec animation is so fucking overkill. Even if you can see difference in current one and 100x100x5 - no one on this forum will give a fuck if it's smooth 28 frames animation or just 2 frames swapping.

IMO. Avatar size problem exist just for you because you are trying to use things (giant-sized high-framed animation) not appropriate to the circumstances (forum avatar). IMO.

PS. Your cache argument is invalid. On mobile (unlike desktop) I can't set 10GB+ cache for obvious reason. Usual 100-200 MB cache wil get overwritten pretty fast with active surfing.

PS2. Just for your info, GIF doesn't support "32k depth".

PS3. Just played a bit with your current gif. Color reduction 256->128 gives zero visual differece but image size drops to 800k. Color reduction to 64 gives very small difference in downscaled image, but image size drops to 500k.
Downscaling it to 100x100x128colors gives image size of 112k.
Seriosly, learn to optimize.