I do not know
parpho, so at best I can only speculate. I will tell you that my reaction to reading your original post was
"21 GB !!!!!" I mean, we all have our methods and our reasons, and yours are up to you. I will just mention that it does save memory, but mostly because I'm not interested in supplying free stock photos to the world at large, I normally cut my posted images down to a max of 800 pixels horizontal and/or 640 pixels vertical (taking into account the typical horizontal rectangular screen. I generally run slightly below the middle of the JPEG compression range. I think a significant number of PBase members do similar things.
Given those parameters, at this moment I have 553 galleries and 14411 images online, consuming the dreadful total of 1368 Megabytes of storage space. For that I pay the princely sum of $43 a year -- I spend that much at Starbucks some months. I also note that in the ten years I've been here, the storage allowed for the basic $23 has gone from 200 MB to 1000 MB, for the first few years it was increasing faster than I was adding photos! And I suspect we might be about due for another increase, it's been a while since the last.
I took a brief look at your PBase gallery and it was empty. Then I went to your Zenfolio gallery, where you do indeed have some very nice photos, but I noticed they seem to be uploaded at (possibly) full camera resolution. Now you may well have any of a number of good reasons for that (you're also allowed to have bad reasons
), and it's none of my business, but to me it seems as though you've set yourself up and now you're complaining.
Ya gotta do what you think ya gotta do, but I don't share your "ridiculous" assessment.
Best of luck whatever you wind up with,
DaveT