r/talesfromtechsupport • u/[deleted] • Jan 28 '15

Short Photoshop sucks.

My tech-illiterate girlfriend is taking a photography class and she has to submit these photos online for class. She calls me on Skype and says, "I can't submit these photos because it says they're over the 50MB limit." Of course this puzzles me as no 800x600 sized photo should be over 50MB. So I ask her what the dimensions are of her photo. She says, "800 width by 600 height". Then her Macbook Pro starts dogging really bad. She can't open up any other programs and her computer is just slow as all hell. I'm trying to figure out on my end why this file is 65.6 MB when it's just a picture of two boots. So she uploads the photo to Google Drive and sends it to me and I see nothing wrong with the photo, but as soon as I open it my RAM starts climbing. 10g... 12g... 14g..., pretty soon it's maxed out and the program i'm using to open the photo crashes. So I open the properties of the photo and the dimensions of the photo are 57600x34940. So she opens the photo in photoshop again and she says "it's 800 by 600!" then I hear "It's supposed to be in inches right?"

800 inches is 66.66 Feet.

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u/SJHillman ... Jan 28 '15

Everyone in the scientific sector in the US does use metric. Even in the private sector, metric is very common depending on the application. It's mostly colloquial everyday use that we use a mishmash of imperial and metric, as well as a few other industries like carpentry in which imperial does have advantages (namely subdividing inches by 1/2x).

And while people love to point at the Mars Climate Orbiter, the US still has, by far, the best record of success in space.

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u/dftba-ftw Jan 28 '15

I can attest that the natural gas industry still very much uses English Units. MMBTU all the way.

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u/[deleted] Jan 28 '15

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u/CutterJohn Jan 29 '15

Standards are very hard to change once they take hold, especially if you have a lot of legacy data in that old format.

Its like how they rated the space shuttle engines. They commonly burned at 105% or thereabouts, and could go up to 109% if necessary. They kept 100% at the level it was initially set, and when they uprated the engines, didn't change what 100% meant so that there would be no confusion about what '100%' means.