downsizing my photos
How do I downsize the photos I transfer from my camera to my “pictures” document to be able to email the photos to a friend please?
Asked by: Joan S Ferguson
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May 14th, 2009 at 9:31 am
One option is to use the Send to.. option which may be in the software you use to look at photos or from Explorer when you look in the “My Pictures” folder you can right mouse click and select Send to… then Email recipient.
This will usually give you an option “do you want to reduce the size”.
Alternatively you can save a version at lower quality from your photo software by selecting “Save as…” then setting the JPEG comprssion higher in the options box.
Would be helpful to know what email software you use and what photo software.
May 14th, 2009 at 9:57 am
It’s a good idea to resize photos before you email them to someone as modern digital cameras can produce very large files (usually in the .jpg format). An 8 megapixel camera’s pictures are typically 1.5MB each and if you are sending several, it can soon add up to an email message large enough to cause problems.
There are several ways to do it. The simplest (if you use Windows and Outlook Express) is to right-click on the photo and select Send To.. | Mail Recipient. That produces a little pop-up window which asks you if you’d like to make your pictures smaller before you send them. By clicking on the “Show More Options” link, you can select the target size. The largest is 1024 x 768, which will almost fill most PC screens, and reduces the file size from 1.5MB to 150kB – about a tenth of its original size. Selecting 640 x 480 will reduce it to about 70kB.
There a lots of free and paid-for graphics programs available which will do lots more to pictures as well as resize them, such as cropping them to remove unwanted borders, levelling up the horizon, changing the brightness and contrast, and so on.
Two very good free ones are Paint.NET (http://www.getpaint.net/) and Irfanview (http://www.irfanview.net/)
May 14th, 2009 at 5:02 pm
Picasa3 from google is very easy to use and you can send pictures via email.
May 15th, 2009 at 11:04 am
To add to Jim’s point about Picasa, when you use the “E-mail” command, by default Picasa will compress the picture to a size suitable for e-mailing. There are options under the Tools menu for changing the compression rate.
Don’t forget that, if you have more than one or two photos to send, the best way of sharing them is by using a web album. Picasa has a very good one built in, and there are others easily available – for free!