John R. Owens wrote:
I don't know if this might have ever been suggested before already, but perhaps a change in software could allow us to set a maximum image size in our user preferences? Either in width/height, e.g. "always shrink images to less than 200 pixels wide or 150 pixels high, whichever is smaller", or in kB, e.g. "always shrink images to less than 10 kB".
Unfortunately I don't think this would be a workable solution, unless a thumbnail duplicate of every image was created at the time of uploading. That would be fairly straightforward to do, although it would be very resource intensive on the image server(s). (Is there more than one yet?) To shrink each image after every request before sending to the browser would literally kill the servers.
A better way would be to allow for a user preference to have images either on or off by default, but have a link on the page to view a version with images. So if a user browsing with images off wanted to see an image, they could then re-load the page with images included. (If it's good enough for Outlook, then it's good enough for Wikipedia.)