Uploading S&S Now, Plus Changes in Future

I'm uploading S&S now... going a little slow because I still need to use the five-at-a-time loader because of compression issues with the batch one. I'll post again when it's done.

Starting with the next chapter, either picture size, graphics format, or both, is going to have to change. The current chapter is 63M, about average for the S&S chapters, because I settled on an 800 pixel wide picture in PNG format, meaning each picture is 400-600k. Unfortunately at that rate, I'm going to run out space really quickly (I've already used up over 20% of my free gig), and while I was always planning on shelling out the $20 (yearly) to get extra space, I'd rather not only do it later, but not have to worry about filling it up, too, as the next higher level is $75/year and that's more than I want to pay for this.

I'm still debating between dropping size, changing to JPG, or both. If I do both, the pictures will be about a third their current file size and end up approximately the image size and quality available on the Sims' site... not horrible, but definitely a big change from the current quality. If I only do one of those, I'll still drop the size to about half, which might be enough. So I need to decide on that before I start working on the next chapter. I'm really not sure which trade-off is best. The quality loss in JPG is noticeable to me although it's not bad when I'm not looking at them side-by-side, so I might stick with the larger pictures, which I like, and just do that. On the other hand, the high-quality-but-smaller images look nice, but lose a little detail, though I could probably also crop closer in some cases. Doing both would definitely make it sure I can fit this and future projects in my paid space, but the result is obviously the least attractive... so, I don't know yet.

I may leave TD in the high-quality larger size because it's a limited run with a lot fewer pictures per upload, but S&S is going to be a lot of chapters... and I've another project in the works for after TD is done.

So... um. Enjoy the high quality while you can. I'll leave the current chapters as is, but next time it'll be different.