the reason for a max image width of 640 has nothing to do with server storage space or isp bandwidth - trad gang has unlimited amounts of both.
we ask to limit image sizes for three reasons -
- it makes for faster image loading as some folks just don't have the greatest net access bandwidth
- it prevents opening up a horizontal page scroll for folks who have lower screen resolutions
- for the very most part, a 640 wide image is plenty big enuf to show good images
i'm not even gonna get into image compression - at least 90% of all posted images on all forums everywhere aren't compressed and just waste a lotta space, but mostly they will have much higher download times. for example, a typical 640x365 image saved without compression will make for about a 367k image filesize - if compressed conservatively at 50%, the image is now 60k in filesize, and the image quality is excellent.
unfortunately, our current forum software does not allow for any automatic posted image resizing or compression.