Why?

[heero 12]

Why is the avatar limit at 20KB? It's just so low.

 

[Sage]

That's pretty generous if you ask me... My avatar has a rather large variety of colors (just look at the shading), so it was exported as a 256-color GIF, and yet it still comes in at under 6KB.

 

[Jordan]

It's not really all that low when you consider the fact that limit is for a 100x100 image. You also have to take loading times and bandwidth into consideration. If everyone who posted in a page of a thread (which by default contains 20 posts) had avatars of maximum file size, that would be more than 400 KB to download of avatars alone!!! Even with our current size limit, avatars consume about 15 GB of bandwidth per month. So, as you can see, our max size is actually quite large. If anything, it should be smaller.

 

[heero 12]

Here is the 27K .png

And then the 3K .jpg

I wish I could just get it down to 18K or so, but for that to happen I'd need to write up a new form of image compresion.

 

[Sage]

Are you using Photoshop? It tends to produce bloated PNG images. And anyway, why do you specifically want it to be a PNG? Let me show you what I outputted:

GIF 256 Colors (7.6 KB)

PNG 24 (18.3 KB)

JPG 100% (13.3 KB)

 

[heero 12]

Holy crap I'm dumb, forgot PS was even on my HD. Got a 100% .jpg that looks exactly the same for 10K.