“Is something wrong with MailChimp?” my friend asked. He then described some quirky things that were happening.

I told him I’d actually just done the same two types of campaigns the week before without any problems. Andy dug into the issues and here’s what he wrote me:

Apparently, MailChimp has a 10MB storage limit on its image gallery. (That’s where every picture and graphic you upload gets placed.) When…  editing functions started to fail, I must have been reaching my limit. Finally, I got to a point where I couldn’t upload pictures anymore. There’s no warning indicator when this happens. I couldn’t even find anything in the help system that specifically addressed this issue. I stumbled upon the reference to the 10MB limit sort of by chance.

I got into this situation because I was uploading images such as Cru logos without compressing them (the screen version is almost 2MB and the print 4MB). I also uploaded images that I eventually didn’t use because I was trying them out to see how they would look and fit in letters. So bottom line, I accumulated excess images…

I went into the image gallery and deleted all but pictures that I was using or had used for past letters. Performance and upload snapped back…

When Do You Need to Compress Photos?

If you print prayer letters, write blog posts, and send MailChimp letters, you’ll need to learn how to compress photos. If you use the full (large) size of your digital photo:

• the print file can get too large for printing letters
• you may run out of room in your media library for your blog
• … and in the image gallery for MailChimp and other similar accounts (as Andy found out)

So, you’ll want to compress your photos.  (You don’t have these problems with Facebook because it compresses photos for you during the upload. TntMPD also compresses photos.)

Compress Your Photos

Related Posts (worth the read):

• When Photos Are Too Big
• DPI–How Many Dots Do You Need?

The image of the harbor in Lindau,Germany, is available on Wikimedia Commons.