Attachments & Gallery Image Recommendations

[Brian]

We just moved one of our sites over to S3. We are an image heavy community.

I want to know what are the normal recommendations that you have set for max attachment size + image pixel size? Do you recommend your users to use different services like Flickr, YouTube, etc. and just embed?

Thank You!

 

[Joel R]

You're asking about a couple of different items so I'm going to parse the question into:

Attachments - These are attachments that appear in any content areas (not gallery).  This really depends on your site's need to have high quality and large-sized photos in places like blog posts, forum posts, or replies.  You can embed images from third party services into the editor.  

Gallery Images - These are images that appear specifically in the gallery.  You cannot embed images from third party services into the Gallery.  

Videos - This is the only area that I feel strongly about.  I'm personally not a fan of storing video in Invision Community at all, mainly that the suite does not encode or deliver the video.  It's literally just a raw file.  This is where I strongly feel users are better off uploading the video to external services like YouTube or Vimeo, which offers a video experience that users expect.