Reducing image file size?

[Bifta]

Originally Posted by Sociable

True if you need to preserve very high quality for future printing etc but can be ideal for sending a copy of the latest snaps of "Junior" to auntie flow in OZ.

Then you're still better off using a jpeg. a 1600 x 1200 full colour image (from your average 2.1 megapixel digital camera) if saved as a full sized 256 colour gif will end up around 700k, a 40% compressed jpg (which is still better quality than the gif) will be less than 300k.

Below is an example (pictures courtesy of my local beach ) the jpg is around 20k .. the same picture saved as a gif is 162k

[Bifta]

Originally Posted by susie r

Can anyone help me on this one please, have just put all our xmas pics on the puter from the digital camera and want to e-mail some to friends, but some of the file sizes are very big and would take ages for them to send...........is there some way of reducing the file size for this purpose? I use hotmail mainly ,so need to be able to save in a smaller size then send ................is some special software needed for this, or am I just being dumb?

Have a look here

http://download.com.com/3120-20-0.ht...ize&tg=dl-2001

I've used Batch IT Ultra and it's pretty easy to get to grips with, in fact, most of the tools there are.

Originally Posted by glentoran

if you have jpegs to big to email they must be huge i would go with the resizing option, or how about winzip? would that reduce them?

Trying to Zip a compressed file format like jpg can actually *increase* the size of the file!

Generally, if an image is only to be viewed on a monitor it's not necessary to have the information in the image that you'd need to print it out as a photo.

For instance to print a photo at a reasonable quality you'd have to have a resolution of at least 300 pixels per inch, but to view it on a monitor only requires 72 pixels per inch.

If you re-size the image down to around 600 pixels maximum dimension it will still be perfectly clear when someone else is looking at it on their monitor and if you save it with a jpg compression set at level 4 (in Photoshop use the "save as" option to set the compression) you can reduce an image from eg around 3 megabytes to less than 100 kilobytes!

[susie r]

Many thanks to all of you for the suggestions.........I used acdsee and just opened each pic and saved as jpg, hey presto, the file was made much smaller...............easy when you know how!!! thanks again