Hey guys. I have a really great 5.1 megapixel camera that takes some really sharp photos. The only problem is that when I transfer them from my camera to my computer, the jpeg it produces is often 2-3 MB at high picture quality levels. Is there anyways to compress this image into a smaller file to view? I'm not talking about zipping it for sending it through email. When you go to an internet site with pics, they aren't 2-3 MB...they are usually 200 KB or so for high quality photos. Is it my camera that makes such huge files, or is there a way to convert or compress the images to a more usable file size?
On the web your monitor views an image according to the amount of pixels. A 5.1 megapixel camera means the output has 5 million pixels when a 1024 * 768 display has under a million so you have 5-6 displays worth of image. Consider a 1 megapixel photo is larger than the typical display size. You're probably going to want to change image size to a smaller image (amount of pixels) and then compress it as a jpeg image. But once you reduce the size you can't go back at the same quality, so if you want a high qualty copy of the image be sure not to back the image up before reducing size.
The easiest way is to use some photo editing software and do a save as with the file to reduce the size. In Photoshop, for example, there is a Save For Web... option that dramatically reduces the size and allows you to even control the amount of compression.
If you're using Winblowz, go to www.download.com or www.tucows.com and download some image editing software. There's one named IrfanView that can convert your pics to smaller JPG's if you want... and I think it's still free.
...That is if you want to pay $600 for Photoshop. I want to buy Photoshop CS, but that's a lot of money. So now I'm using Photoshop 5.0 LE which has limited funcionability, but is still pretty awesome. In most decent photo editors you should: - reduce image size, for a web reason (email, personal homepage), I don't see why any thing bigger than 600 pixels wide is needed for simple viewing reasons. - when you save as jpeg find the options/preferences and reduce the quality. In jpeg the quality is represented by a percentage (100% being the best). I usually like about 80% image quality, b/c the image is pretty sharp and not quite as big as 100%.
Cool, thanks guys. I'd like a smaller image for most of my pics just to have on my computer. I only want to keep the larger images for printing purposes.
Then IrfanView should work. It can batch convert a folder full of pics and either overwrite the originals or save the originals and create new versions of the files.
