High Res Comics (Patreon)

My husband recently revealed to me a conundrum.  I'm drawing comics at almost 3000x4000 pixels in size, because I like working on big canvases.  Then I'm saving them out and uploading them.  However, this is resulting in PNG files of about 8MB or more, which can, depending on internet connection, take a long time to download for viewing.  We have very fast internet, and it's even taking us a significantly annoying amount of time to upload and download the images to and from the main site.

The problem with this, is that most browsers, and especially mobile devices and tablets, won't let you SEE the files at full size.  They get scaled down.  Furthermore, your monitor/screen has a finite number of pixels, so even if you are zooming in, you STILL won't be seeing the image at full resolution because your screen can only display a certain number of pixels.

So, and... I'm only just now coming to understand this, the only reason to WANT a High-Res image file is for other uses, like making it into a wallpaper on a high-res monitor, or printing it out for a poster or something.  I imagine MOST people just want to read the comic... and I'm basically forcing my users to download an 8MB image file every time they want to read the most recent page.  That's a lot of wasted time and bandwidth and hard-drive space for zero actual benefit for most people.

So, here's how I'm fixing this.  I recently went through and scaled ALL current comics on the main site to a much smaller, more consistent width, and those will be going live soon, replacing all the older, ridiculously huge files.  The loss of quality should be near zero, and the speed at which the site loads should be WAY, WAY faster.

For my Patrons of the Scavenger Tier and above, I'll now be uploading High-Res versions of each page for your use.  (Older pages are already in High-Res and are still going to be High Res on Patreon.  There's just no way I'm going through all 60+ posts and reuploading them.)  So now the public will get to enjoy fast, clean-looking comics that conveniently hide all my stupid little lazy mistakes, and my Patrons will still have access to the slow, bigger files if they want them!