One of the joys of photography is being able to share treasured images with family and friends. When I first started taking digital photographs, I emailed images but then realized many people didn't know how to open and view a picture file. I also realized I was loading up people's email boxes with really big files.
My solution was to open an account at a web based picture hosting site. Now I just send folks a link to the pictures I want to share, and only make prints on request.
Large image files - a two part fix
Even the web gallery approach can be a burden to friends if we upload pictures that are large in pixel dimensions. Large files not only require people scroll in order to see them but can take quite a while to download, particularly for those with slower internet connections. The problem is, some of us are unaware of these issues, and others don't know how to fix them. It's actually a two part fix, involving pixel dimensions and image quality, which in digital photo terms means the amount of compression used when creating an image file.
Here's a link to an image from my 3 megapixel Nikon CP995. You may not want to click on it though because, even after cropping, it's really huge. The dimensions are 1832 by 1384 pixels (2.5MP), and the file size is 1.2MB.
Resize image so it doesn't scroll
The first step in making it user-friendly would be to reduce it in size so it can be seen without scrolling. That's easy enough to do with any image editing program. If you're using some version of Photoshop, just go to [image], click on [image size], and change the width to 640 pixels. That automatically changed the height to 480 pixels for my picture. It's large enough to see the detail, but can be viewed all at once without scrolling by anyone whose monitor is running at a resolution of 640X480 or greater, which is most everybody these days. Problem fixed, right?
No. Because if I save this picture and upload it to my web-gallery without changing anything else, it will be almost half a megabyte, which would still present a burden for dial-up users.
