I took some pictures with my 6 megapixel digital camera and they came out great. (Good enough to enlarge a couple of them and hang them in frames on the wall.)
But–I’d also like to send them by email. And the jpg files are almost 2 megabytes in size–which makes it hard to send 15 or 20 pics by email.
Is there a solution to this?
Use a quality graphics program to optimize the images. That will reduce the file size somewhat.
You could also upload the images to a hidden directory on a web site. Then just send your email with links to the images.
You could use a photo sharing website like Flickr which allows 10MB photos, and then make an album (public or private) and send people a link to the album, or the individual images, in email.
Or you could get an image editing program like GIMP or Irfanview to make the images smaller, and then email.
You should also probably put all of your photos in a zip archive before mailing them out.
Note that you’ll likely want to do two things (which can be done with GIMP or any similar program):
Reduce the size of the pictures.
Increase the compression ratio of the jpg images.
When I send picks over email from my 6 MP camera I usually resize the image to about 600x480, sometimes a little larger (just make sure the aspect ratio remains the same) and set the JPG compression to high or medium-high (about 60-75%)
Looks good and the images come out to no more than a 100k each (IIRC).
ZIPping .jpgs won’t do much good. JPEGs are already compressed, and ZIP won’t make them much smaller.
The main thing is to use a program to reduce the resolution (number of pixels). There are plenty of freeware or shareware utilities for that. I use xnview (with no good reason to pick it instead of others). Most will also allow you to crop pictures (also useful to reduce the size), and adjust contrast, etc.
No, it won’t make them smaller, but it simplifies things a lot…instead of making 10 attachments, you only need one, the compressed archive.
TryPicasa?
If you’re using Microsoft Windows XP, they have provided a solution for you. It is among the little-known Power Toys:
http://www.microsoft.com/windowsxp/downloads/powertoys/xppowertoys.mspx
Select ‘Image Resizer’, fifth from the bottom. Once installed, you simply right-click on the files you wish resized. Select ‘resize’ from the options and use the simple interface. It’s the most painless solution.
Check the manual for your camera. I have a KonicaMinolta DiMage that will specifically let me size any image for email. I select the image(s) go to the menu and make an email copy of it. Very simple.
That is a neat little feature! Just be sure to click the ‘advanced’ button and be sure that ‘resize the original picture (don’t create copies)’ is UNchecked, otherwise you’ll lose your original.
Thanks!
Irfanview is your friend
The original ACDSee is great too if you can find it (the versions that were freeware)
A solution that requires no additional software is to open them in MS Paint and save as GIFs. They also stay the same size, when the recipient opens them.
I stumbled on this as a way to save multiple screen captures to send to tech support. You do lose resolution, but that happens no matter what.
Ah, no. A .jpg photograph renders in a full color spectrum. Converting a .jpg photo to a .gif image will destroy the image since .gif images can only display in a 256-color format.
6 megapixels is about 5 megapixels too much. Nobody needs that kind of resolution outside of the professional printing industries.
I suggest you alter teh settings on your camera to take pics at 2 megapixels at the most. Unless you’re going to be printing them as regular photos, in which case, maybe up it to 3.
I wouldn’t agree with this. It’s always nice to have the option of printing something at a later date, and with the dirt cheap price of hardrives right now (per GB of space) there is really no excuse not to have a high resolution version of all your important pics. If you really don’t think you will ever print a particular picture, then you have the option of saving it at a lower rez. There’s also the nice option of cropping. Once you get rid of the extra information on you 6 MP picture, it’s gone, you can’t blow up, or crop a particular area in a smaller pic without a huge drop in quality.
I read my camera instruction book…
I try to plan ahead…
It takes two hard drives because if a hard drive is not mirrored, or you do not invest in a quality burner and a huge stack of platters, your data is not safe for the future.
I very, very, very, seldom print a picture anymore, I do all my sharing via the net and many of those folks are stuck with dial-up so I just resize as has been noted before.
I personally shoot most at 2 meg-pix because of the shear volume of pictures I take. Digital cameras allow me so much room that I shoot thousands of pictures so a lot of deleting is desired. 27 shots of the pretty kitty is a good number to get that really good shot but I am not going to keep all 27, that’s for sure. Maybe 2-3.
YMMV
*:: I wove my IrfanView™… Batch conversions with ‘rename’ is the cats meow… :: *
YMMV
Any photo manipulation program, including the one that comes with Windows has a “resize” feature, usually located in a drop-down menu called “Image”. It will allow you to resize the photo to something manageable, such as 640x480. Then use ‘save as…’ so you don’t overwrite your original. Or am I missing the point?