Reasonable image upload file size on 3g

Question

An app I'm working on allows users to submit photos from the iPhone to a website. I'm all set with resizing the image on the client and converting it to a jpeg.

I'm wondering if there are any best practices, general experiences or statistics that can help lead to reasonable assumptions for a decent file size to target. I know 3g speeds can vary significantly and I'm trying to find a good compromise between quality and time to upload and reliability to complete an upload. I'd like to get something reasonable in place before I head down the path of threading out the upload and handling resumes.

I appreciate any tips from your experiences or pointers to guidelines or studies about this.

Thanks

Answer 1

Doing What Apple Does can't be too far wrong for things like this (at least, once you've verified that Apple's done something vaguely sensible):

• Mail on 3.1.2 ("X-Mailer: iPhone Mail (7D11)") seems to resize images to 800x600 and send with a "quality" that makes it about 100 KB.
• Mail on 4.1 (and 4.0 IIRC) gives you a choice of "Small" (33 KB), "Medium", (100 KB), "Large" (380 KB), and "Actual Size" (probably the original image). Medium is probably 800x600 as before; I'm not sure about the others.

The default you pick depends on the kind of sharing you want to do; I'd expect reasonably high quality for something like Flickr (where I'm sharing photos of my trip) but not something like Facebook (where I'm sharing random pictures of my friends). You could give the user a choice between S/M/L in a segmented control when uploading, or in settings, or something.

You can also turn off 3G/WiFi and see how long it takes over 2G.