A little bit of site business. Actually more of the lotts-bit in a sense. When the site started oh so many years ago the maximum dimension an image could be was 700 pixels on the long side. The reasons behind this were purely practical since web space was quite limited, sparse and somewhat hard to come by. Keeping image dimensions limited would (and did) keep the overall load of the site down.
As the site progressed these self-imposed limits loosened from 700 to 800 and then 1000 pixels. When Doctor Who moved into HD at the very end of the Tennant era it became somewhat nonsensical to cap stories made in HD at less than that quality so (eventually) the limit went up yet again to 1280. As space became easier and easier to come by, let alone manage we loved to a true HD+ limit of 2048 pixels for any non-cap images (caps were still ‘capped’ at 1280 as they dominate the overall image count and we still exercise some discretion here).
Revolution of the Daleks marks another potential pivot point for content insofar as it was the first story made in 4K resolution. This led us to experiment with a new procedure for capping to produce true HD (at 1920×960 for a Whittaker story) in a quality we were happy with. Why not go all the way to 3860×1920? It took 400GB for space to produce the raw caps for Revolution before culling and image processing took place. We have to mindful of the practicalities of hosting and think the result at a mere 1920 was worth it.
But the inevitable trend for images of course is moving ever upward so going forward the new upper limit to images will be 2560 pixels, a far, far cry from the 700 base from long ago. This doesn’t come without a cost however. Many of the earliest images (dating back to at least 2003 and probably older) were GIF files, but in terms of cataloging this poses problems for the back-end software the Tour uses so these ‘old boys’ will slowly be extinguished as those galleries are updated.
Onward and upward.