Resize Your Internet Photos

RIVER BENDER - November,  2003

Don't Send Big Photos: I hate it when someone sends me a huge photo or worse yet several huge photos attached to an e-mail message. My definition of huge is when the file size of the photo is over 100k bytes. Here's an example: Someone takes a picture of their cat with their new digital camera and sends it to me. They don't bother setting their camera to low resolution (around 640 x 480 pixels) that is a standard size for web and e-mail images. Their picture turns out to be 1152 x 872 pixels which creates a file size of 170k bytes. It only took them a few seconds to send it to me because they have high-speed cable service but it took me over a minute to receive it with my slower dial-up service. Just imagine the time several pictures would take. I sometimes play Freecell cards waiting on downloads.

I decided to make a test and resized the cat photo to 640 x 480 pixels and sent it to myself. It only took 12 seconds to receive because the file was reduced from 170k to 30k bytes! Did resizing affect the quality? Not so you could notice. In fact it made viewing easier since the picture was no longer so big that it had to be scrolled to see all of it. So how can you resize your photos smaller to send over e-mail or post on a web page? Read on.

File Size and Image Size: When resizing an image for the Internet there are two important factors to consider. They are the image file size and the image size in width x height in pixels. File size directly affects the time required to download and display. The smaller the file in bytes, the faster the image will download and display. Always remember that not everybody has high-speed service like yours. If your image files are large and slow to download you might lose your audience before the images are even displayed. You must also consider image size in pixels (width x height). The common display screen resolutions are VGA - 640 x 480 pixels, Super VGA - 800 x 500 pixels and XGA - 1024 x 758 pixels. For practical purposes VGA is the lowest standard still in use. To assure easy viewing you should keep your image sizes 640 x 480 pixels or less and be sure to send them in jpg format.

Lots of Pixels for Printing: If you're creating images with your digital camera intended for printing then take high resolution shots with a setting like 1600 x 1200 pixels. But don't send these by e-mail unless you know that the receiving party intends to print them. If you're going to post pictures on the web or attach them to e-mail for viewing take low resolution shots like 640 x 480 pixels.

Resizing Software: To resize high resolution images smaller one needs special software. If you have a digital camera the software that came with it usually has photo editing that includes resizing. I use PaintShop Pro, MS FrontPage, Compushow or Image Expert that came with my Epson camera. If you don't have image editing software you can download a neat freeware program called Photo Resizer from "Show Your Photos" that's available at http://www.showyourphotos.com. It's a small program and only takes a few minutes to download and install.

How Photo Resizer Works: After installing (1) Click on the Photo Resizer icon on your desktop. (2) Click on Open/New and go to the folder where the image is located that you want to resize. Select it and it will be displayed with its file size, number of colors and pixel size. (3) Click on Resize and the resized image will be displayed alongside with its file size, colors and pixels. You can change the default resize but it's usually the best choice. (4) Click on Save As and give the resized image a new name or let it replace the original larger image. Keep the larger original image if you intend to print it later.

Other Tips: Rather than send a bunch of photos via e-mail it's better to post them on a web page and send the address of the page by e-mail. If you don't know how to create a web page go to http://www.google.com and enter "free photo web page" or similar key words and look for one of many web sites that will let you upload your photos to a web page they've created.

If you create a web page with lots of photos a tip is to use thumbnail photos that will enlarge when clicked on. This will make the web page display faster and the viewer can select the images he wants to enlarge. MS FrontPage is the only software I know of that can create thumbnails but there are probably others if you search Google.

By the way, have you noticed that when someone on AOL sends several photos to you they come in a single zipped file that you must run through a decompression program like WinZip to see them? The sender didn't zip them - AOL did as a matter of policy. I haven't the foggiest notion why they zip jpg files that are already compressed. It does nothing but make extra work for the recipient, assuming that he even has WinZip or similar software. If not he's out of luck. Some web sites where you send photos to by e-mail for posting won't even accept Zip files. In this case AOL users must send one photo per e-mail message. Other web sites won't even accept zip files because of possible viruses.