Imagine Size Restriction
 

I don't suppose there's a way to increase the size limit on images to 50.2MB to be precise.

Just so we can load in the amazing Faerun map by Mike Schley :D

The Maps

Edit: It really wouldn't matter as the app is struggling to work with large pictures. Resizing the picture now.

Love Mike Scley's work. I just bought all the Curse of Straud maps so I can make battle maps and print on a plotter printer. I think its great that WoTC commissioned the work such that Mike retains a license to sell reproductions and I hope Mikes makes as much or more money this way than if he charged WoTC more and sold the art outright.

There is very little practical value in a huge, high-resolution map for showing on your SCREEN. Your screen is 96dpi, and the high-resolution map is so you can PRINT it with high quality. So you'll get excellent results by simply converting the image to 100dpi (or 96dpi). You can also carve the big image up into smaller pieces (i.e. regions) that may make sense to keep at higher resolutions than 100dpi. You can then use the smaller pieces as "zoomed in" maps for specific regions.

Hope this helps!

Rob are you seriously going to look a publisher like WotC or Paizo in the face and tell them no high res maps or images and expect them to sell their product on your market place?

They cannot be printed from RW, so there is no impact on using slightly lower resolution images.

As a user, I would look publishers in the eye and say that my use at the table requires quick access and reasonable load times.

I would think publishers would expect PDF-sized images for modules which are well under the threshold. As for campaign material and high-res world maps, I would think they'd prefer that all their users can access reasonably (because pins will add complexity and probably affect load times) rather than a small number being able to view maps with highest resolutions.

I keep a high res version of all maps outside of RW so that I can print and manipulate. It's a pain to have to maintain multiple files rather than use RW as my repository. But the inability to print or export makes that non-viable at this time.

You could probably also attach the full res version as a file rather than a graphic image. With this method, when you opened the file it would launch an outside graphics viewer/editor and you would bypass the RW display limits. Not ideal, but it may meet your needs.

This.

What I would hope/expect is that the smart maps and images would be screen optimized for player view.

But I would also hope that hi-res version of the maps would be available for people like me who still like to print out battlemaps on my plotter printer for moving minis. I hi-res also lets you manipulate the image for your preferred VTT (I would assume that most VTTs most downsample huge images, but I have limited experience with the VTTs).

A suggestion: You can retain your high resolution map and probably use it in Realm Works at full size if you save a copy as a .jpeg format at 65% image quality. You will not lose much detail at all (especially at that resolution) and it will end up being 1/4 of the file size (if not more). You will need photoshop (or similar image editing software) to accomplish this, however.

I would really love to have someone give me a little more detail on how I can change the the images I find on the web.

In my case I am using the wonderful Greyhawk maps that have been made by Anna Meyer. There are a number of maps I would love to use that are far below Realmworks file the size limit, but exceed the pixel limit.

I know close to nothing about image files, but am I correct in assuming that when Dunkin suggests changing the resolution this would not impact the pixel limit?

Any advice would be appreciated.

This is correct. Basically, when the image is used in Realm Works in memory, it has to expand out to an uncompressed bitmap for display and for applying what has been revealed. When it is uncompressed, the memory footprint will be on the order of 4 bytes per pixel. So if you have an image that is 4096 x 4096 pixels, it uses up 64 MB of memory just for the image data. But then when you have the reveal mask applied on that, a new image is needed with that in place that is another 64 MB. And, as you may notice, player view doesn't immediately update as you make changes, until you press save. This is accomplished by having another copy of the image for player view. So for one image shown in player view and being edited in a tab, you would be using 3 x 64 MB to store the data. If you have several images like this, memory usage adds up quickly.

For image format, a lot depends on what kind of image. For many maps, they won't have a lot of colors and so PNG file format can often be smaller than JPG, unless you lower the quality a lot on the JPG. And an advantage of PNG is that it doesn't throw out image data like JPG does. What you may find useful when considering file format is to save in several different formats and see what works best for your needs. Using a program such as Paint.NET (which is free), you can convert to other formats easily.

Good info. to know, David. Thanks. I wasn't aware the RW converts it to an uncompressed bitmap when loaded in memory. Nor was I aware that there we a pixel limit. What is the resolution limit for an image in RW, by the way?