The reason the links work now is that I've gone back and set the site Accessibility to Whole Wide World or somesuch. David, what you say may be true, but only the URL format that I exampled in the above reply will let the image display for others. I deduce that the 640 pixels is to fit the page format. The 640 pixel limit is in regards to the width only (i.e. left/right dimension). The reason for this limit is to eliminate the need for left/right scrolling to read the replies on a page for those members that are limited in the resolution that their system can handle.
As for the height (i.e. top to bottom) of an image there is no restriction, for example your picture of the locomotive on the trestle measures 640 pixels wide and 816 pixels in height, which is fine. Taking the point about file size, I don't think we need worry too much because:
- a 640 x image is never going to be very big That doesn't really hold completely true, while image dimensions do have affect on file size. You can have an image whose dimensions are 640 x 480 and still have a file size of a couple of mega bytes (i.e. 2,000,000 bytes). For example, the image of the locomotive on the trestle has dimensions of 640 pixels x 816 pixels, yet the file size is 107,558 bytes in size. The other image of yours in my reply measures 640 pixels x 479 pixels, and has a file size of 85,714 bytes. - the image itself does not appear in MLS and does not travel with the email feed: it's just a web link that opens inside the message. The actual image isn't stored on the MLS server, in your case it's stored on the Google server where your web site is stored. However, each time a user on MLS opens the topic where you've placed a link to one of your images, the MLS server downloads a copy from the Google server then passes that copy as part of the web page that MLS sends to the user that is trying to look at the page with your images included in a reply.
This is one place where you can run into a problem, for example lets say that Google has a bandwidth limit (and I don't know if they do or don't) on each of its free web sites (i.e. amount of data transmitted and/or received within a specified period of time on behalf of a user.). You create a topic on MLS that has five image links in the reply. Then 75 users on MLS open your topic basically at the same time, that means that the MLS server will access the Google server 75 times, and download 75 copies of the five images you included. Depending on the bandwidth limit that Google may have set, those 75 requests may exceed the bandwidth, and access to your images will be denied until a period of time has elapsed. The result is the little red kiss (i.e. x) in a box even though there's nothing wrong with the manner in which you created the request to include the image in your reply.
If you encounter this problem just stop using the image tags and instead use the URL link tags (i.e. [*url] & [*/url]). That way nothing is downloaded from the Google server until someone opens your topic and then clicks the URL link to your image. Even then just that one image will be downloaded, while the other four links just sit there. Anyway I've compressed my pictures as hard as they'll go, resulting in sizes around 100kB or less. So long as the file size stays somewhere around 150,000 bytes or less you'll be OK. Again the main reason for the concern is the amount of time it takes to download really large files on members systems that are stuck with slow dial-up modem connections. Just as a FYI, if you're using MS/Internet Explorer and you want to see information on one of your images displayed in a browser window. Just right-click the image, then select and click the Properties item on the context menu that displays, when the properties page displays you'll find the URL for the image, the displayed image dimensions (i.e. width & height), and the file size in bytes listed. Other browsers have the same capabilities I'm just not sure of how to use them. Hope the above is of help to you, any other questions feel free to ask away. SteveC |