Yes, a irresponsibly large image is only one of several things someone can do to make their post annoying. But it's different in that this is accessible to anyone regardless of having to pay money for tools or how proficient they are with English. In short, there's no excuse.
Some say it's OK because the system resizes it for you, but this logic has two flaws:
First, that's not always true. On one of the systems I'm frequently on large images are not resized. Here is a snippet of the screen shot of the top of this question:
The fuzzy gray area is the top left corner of the full size original image. I can't even see the connector part in that picture with the window I am using without scrolling.
Second, most browsers don't shrink pictures very well. When they do shrink them, it's usually just resampling at the output resolution. That is fine when the original is fuzzy enough as in this case, but it makes a mess of line art like schematics. The basic issue is resize algorithms generally don't do anti-aliasing, probably to allow for faster display since good anti-aliasing takes significant compute cycles.
The right answer of course is for users to do the work once to properly size a picture, then upload that. Then every browser can display it properly without having to guess what it should do with it.
Part of the documentation for the site should clearly state that:
- Pictures should be sized to convey the necessary information but not more. We suggest limiting the largest dimension to around 600-640 pixels. That should be sufficient for most pictures. There are cases where you might need more, like a scan of a paper schematic from a manual for example. We leave this to you to decide, but please think about it carefully and only upload a larger image when the extra detail is really needed.
- Take the extra time and crop the image. The one in the question is a great example. Simply cropping it to contain only the object of interest reduced it to 1961 x 746 pixels, which is 3.4 times less without any loss of information or resolution. Here is the result of proper cropping scaled to a maximum dimension of 300 pixels:
- Focus the camera! Blurry pictures are annoying to look at and don't contain much information. This one is a great example since it's so poorly focused we really can't tell what it's trying to show. And no, my phone won't focus closer is no exuse. First, it probably does. Second, even most cheap point and shoot cameras have a macro mode. If your camera or phone can't do the job, find one that does. Posting a blurry mess is no solution to anything.
- Try to do a little black and white level correcting if you can. This is a bit like English not be a native language for some. We don't expect everyone to get this right. Washed out blacks, dingy whites, and a yellow cast will be forgiven to some extent, but at least think about it. There are free tools out there to do these things, so this is accessible to everyone. So while we won't require it, and some failure here will be forgiven, presenting something a cleanly as possible exhibiting attention to detail is a good idea and shows respect for those whom you are asking for free help. This may help you get better and more answers.
Let's at least say all this to users clearly like we do other rules and recommendations for this site. That also gives us something to point to when resizing and cropping a picture for someone, and provides a more clear justification for a downvote. I have downvoted questions before that were poorly communicated, in part based on sloppy and annoying pictures.
A bad picture is more of a insult to us all than bad wording, because anyone can fix the basics of a bad picture whereas it takes time and effort to learn english. We need to draw a line and stick to it, else we'll get more of the same dismal quality of pictures we have seen here lately.
