I’m digging through some of the site settings, and there seem to be some that suggest some auto-clean processes. That would be most ideal. The nice thing is that we have plenty of time to find out what will work without panicking and telling people to stop posting. We’ll keep looking through the settings.
Again, there is no current crisis, and we are still under half of our storage allotment, so we are thinking very far ahead here.
Ideally, any compression and resizing would take place automatically by the forum software. We just need to find the right settings or plugin. I certainly don’t want people taking multiple manual steps to add a picture to a post.
I expect the forum software is smart enough to dispose of orphaned images that are no longer part of any post. I also wonder how many duplicates there are, and if it would be worth running a task that deduplicates by linking all the posts to one representative copy and discarding the others.
The weather thread is probably image heavy, and I suspect everything older than, say, 90 days could be purged. I suspect none would go looking that far back, maybe even not more than a month.
Guys, there’s no need to worry about any of this right now. Just make sure your images going forward are resized to something not in the megabyte range and we should be fine for the foreseeable future.
I usually take screenshots from my phone and post those because I don’t want the metadata from my images for all and sundry. I figure it shrinks the image size (yay!) but does it put other info I don’t want on here? Tangentially related question.
I saved that squirrel image and loaded it into paintshop pro, there is no EXIF or creator data listed for the image. So it looks like the screenshot is safe from any personal data.