The Steemit API? Mining processes unwittingly running on your machine? Or the sheer volume of oversized photos?

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Images or API?

This post began as a question about massive data consumption, that I was thinking was, at least partly due the file sizes of all the images in everyones articles. But I’m now wondering if it’s something to do with the API. Perhaps a someone from the @dev team can shed some light on it...

Is the steemit dev team already aware of the amount of data the site is consuming?

Are the steemit users unwittingly running mining processes on their machines while they browse the site?

I don't think so, but it could be happening!

Is it caused by the images?

“An picture’s worth a thousand words”, and having the right picture at the top of your post could be worth a thousand steem upvotes (& potentially $1000 steem dollars).

Now, I know steemit does’t host any images. As you all may well know, you have to host images for your articles somewhere else, then embed them in your post’s ’markdown’. This saves the steemit team from having to deal with, and store the hundreds of thousands (or millions??) of photos & animated gif’s that added to all of our articles.

Cool.

I mean, this is a bit of a hassle, but ok.

I get it.

Having to have server space to host all these images would be expensive. Steemit saves a crap load of cash (steem if you like) by not hosting all these images themselves.

The problem with no control by the steemit system is that not many people know how to, or care to, optimise their images before posting them. We end up with 10MB file sizes for a jpg that could be optimised & saved as a file couple of hundred KB in size. Big difference, if you multiply the difference by all the new articles added every minute.

These multi megabyte files are also seen in the search/list results. This is important. This means that without even clicking on an article to read it & view the full sized image, these massively sized images are forced on us, having to be downloaded, eating up valuable bandwidth, when a thumbnail could be served instead.

Spend a few hours scrolling around, reading a few articles & adding comments & upvotes and before you know it you’ve used up several hundred MB of data.

Do this several times a day, and suddenly you’ve burnt up 90% of your 10GB monthly allowance in under a week.

I’ve used up over 9GB in the first week or so, that I was on steemit. And about half of my time on steemit has been on someone else’s wifi, so you could just about double that amount. Maybe I’ve been a little obsessed… too much time on here. But don’t we want users online & engaged all the time?

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Now, if you’re sitting on an unlimited connection, or public/workplace wifi, then you probably don’t care if a photo is 10MB or 180kb in size, as long as it looks good. (and if a photo has been properly optimised you wouldn’t be able to tell the difference either).

But if you’re like me, and stuck with a limited monthly data allowance, and your wondering why your data balance is being churned up so quickly every time you scroll though steemit, then these image sizes matter!

In an ideal world, steemit would be able to host all of our images, and would also be able to at least create thumbnail sized images for the list results of articles, and serve the full sized image only when viewing an individual article… I know the site is responsive, so then there’s the “high density” screens to worry about too, but optimised thumbnails would still save tons of data for all users.

*High density screens (or as mac dubbed it “retina” display):
Most mobiles & tablets (and even some pc’s now) have more pixels per square inch than a regular old computer monitor. This makes them look sharper, as long as the image is large enough. If you want your image to be 200x200 pixels on a mobile device then you have to serve up an image that’s at least 400x400, then the image on the high density display looks sharp.

Even if we took into account the need for hi-resolution images for high resolution screens, there are still a lot of pixels being waisted with all these massive image sizes.

Optimising all of our images would also be in the best interests of the owners of steemit. At the very least, having optimised images would mean the overall speed of the site would be improved. Smaller files for all users to download means the pages would load faster, meaning a better user experience.

The next best thing would be to educate the masses. So that people are at least making their photos optimised for computer screens & not printing. You don’t need an image that’s 3000x2000 pixels @ 300dpi. Images for screen should be converted to 72dpi. This would be a start.

There are any number of free or paid software packages that allow you to do this. Photoshop is the leader of the pack, but also expensive if you have to pay for it yourself. If you’re on a budget, then there’s gimp, paint, photoScape. pixlr, sumo & many many more that are free.

Maybe someone with some sway around here could write up a “how to optimise your images” post so it will be seen… I mean, I’ll write one, just a matter of enough people seeing it to make things change.

ok, I’ve just decided that this post is part 1. In part 2 (coming soon to a steemit post near you) I’ll post a how to guide explaining how to optimise your images for the web. You’ll be amazed! You’ll be spellbound! You’ll no longer unwittingly add massively oversized unoptimised photos to your articles, saving all steemit users from slow loading & excess data usage!

I guess that I could be in the minority, of having to live with limited data month to month. It’s also too easy to upload photos straight from your phone or camera without bothering to optimise them. I know I’ve done this myself with a couple of posts I’ve made on here…

Maybe the steemit development team will one day be able to implement some changes that would help.

As I said, in the end it would make the site faster & more user friendly.

Also, I don’t know how the steemit site is connected / communicating with the steemit databases & servers. Is the constant polling of the server also chewing up copious amounts of data? This would be a harder one to solve.

At least if everyone optimises their images we’d cut down on at least some of the excess data use.