: Ideas for reducing storage needs and/or costs (lots of images) I'm the webmaster for a small social network and have noticed that images uploaded by users are taking a big portion of the capacity

@Welton855

I don't know the exact nature of your social network, but I will just throw this into the pool of answers.

SWFUpload is a flash & javascript based file upload tool that now supports image resizing on the client side (before the file is even uploaded to the server).

This could reduce storage space and server processing time.

Again, might not work for you, but for some folks it may be an option.

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@Miguel251

The Digital Inspiration website achieved 60% cost saving over regular hosting charges by moving static files including images to Amazon's S3 storage service. You could compare the features & charges of Amazon's service with other cloud storage services & consider moving all your images to a cloud-based storage service.

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@Candy875

There are many options available for resizing images on the fly and there is even a PHP Image Resizer class specifically for this.

Netuts have a nice tutorial on this

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@Angie530

Depending on the beginning quality of the images, a little optimization can go a long way. For instance, Photoshop usually saves very large JPEG image files - and bringing the quality down a notch can save a good percentage of the file size without losing too much quality.

A good way to start would be to run all of these images (after backing up the originals, of course) through a batch photo editor like Phatch.

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