Best Possible Resolution

At one time I used Flickr as a gallery space but haven’t used it in several years for much of anything but a repository of photos going back to 2005.

I recently downloaded my Flickr photos to curate them locally instead of online.

At first, I was disappointed in the low-resolution quality of the older photos. Most were no more than 700 pixels on the longest dimension, sometimes 640 pixels.

Then I remembered how slow the internet was in 2005 requiring small file sizes for quick download. A dialup connection at best in 2005 was 9,600 bits per second. Far slower than the 300MB fiber set to be installed at my home on Friday. And that speed was slowed as the signals weren’t asynchronous meaning one-way communications kept the speeds slower as the sending and receiving modems talked to each other between data packets.

Photos needed to be small file sizes. Small enough to speed up delivery but large enough to resolve on the largest screens used at the time, 1024x768. No need to send larger file sizes because they couldn’t be resolved on a home computer screen.

Now I’m wondering what I will think in another twenty years when I look at my Flickr photos from today and wonder why they were only 1920 pixels wide.

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