As many of you may have noticed the Steem blockchain seems to be experiencing some problems these past few days.
I don't really know anything about it other than having been kicked out regularly, steemstats not working, and sometimes not being able to open the website at all, and that made me think about the implications of a rapidly growing community on a platform that is still in beta.
What We Can ALL Do Starting Now
One of the things we can all do starting NOW to secure a fast and smoothly running platform is to ONLY upload images that have been shrunk (resized) to the right size and compressed to the lowest acceptable resolution.
This image, resized to 840 x 472 px, takes up 109kB of space after compression instead of the initial 1600 x 1200 px and 5.49 MB
How?
I always resize and compress my pictures in Photoshop.
Now, I know not everyone is in the possession of Photoshop or knows how to operate it BUT there are many other programs that allow you to adjust and reduce image size.
And most of them are freely available on the Internet.
I'll mention a few here. Just pick one, download and install the program AND START USING IT for ALL the pictures that you want to add to your posts.
What Easy Program You Can Use
And of course there are also websites where you can compress your images online. For example here
What Are You Talking About?
I am not saying you should only upload small pictures, I am saying that you should make sure that your pictures are no wider than max 840 pixels because Steemit doesn't display them any bigger and that they are using up as little MB as possible.
You Are Exaggerating @hatsekidee!
No, I am not.
Don't upload images that are wider than 840 pixels because they take up more blockchain space than neccessary for no reason at all!
When you upload one unedited image that you took with your mobile phone chances are that picture is about 4128 x 3096 pixels large and takes up 2 to 3 MB's of precious blockchain space.
After resizing to max 840 px width and compression for webuse you could reduce that to no more than 100-200 kB, probably even less.
Image source
Smaller Is Better (and Faster!)
Yes, it will cost you a tiny little bit of your precious time, but it will help the Steemit platform immensely, plus: your post will load a lot faster creating a better user experience for your readers!