Preparing digital pictures for emailing or use on a website

Typically, pictures taken on a digital camera are very high resolution. This is useful if you are making prints or enlargements, as the clarity and detail will be excellent.

The difficulty comes when you email these pictures or want to use them on a website. Someone receiving your email and opening the picture will see only a small part of the photo because it is huge. The same will happen if you post them to a web page.

Another problem with emailing or web posting these pictures is file size. With the newer high resolution cameras, one picture can easily be 2 Megabytes or larger. Many email systems won't allow mail that's larger than 5 or 10 Megabytes to be sent through their system. So, if you are attaching a couple of pictures to one email, then either you can't send it, or your recipient can't get it. It's also very difficult and time consuming for those that still use dial-up internet connections.

Many of the photo sharing sites have an image compression utility built in (Yahoo! Photos, Google Picasa, Shutterfly, etc.). This is fine if you are sharing pictures on the internet and upload them directly onto that website.

If you want to email pictures, especially several at once, I'm going to outline a process below that will take care of the compression.

While there are hundreds of programs that can do this including most all picture software that comes with a digital camera, I'm going to pick the one I use as an example. I chose this one for myself because it makes short work of resizing several pictures at one time. This can be a real timesaver, especially if you have shot half a memory card of digital pictures that you want to send.

Start with a free compression (resizing) utility, like JPEG Resizer. You can download a copy here: JPEG Resizer and install it on your computer. (free copy provided in accordance with redistribution terms, Copyright © 2002-2004 Virtualzone.de. All rights reserved. Written by Heinrich Peuser. Website: www.virtualzone.de)

When you start JPEG Resizer, you'll see this:

I'll click Add Files, and select the pictures that I want to resize. It's important to note that the files must be JPG files (pronounced "Jay Peg"). Since this is probably the most common picture file format, almost all cameras will store their downloaded images in this format, so this should not present a problem.

I've selected two picture files to resize for this example:

Resolution

You'll notice that the program determined the resolution of the pictures that I'm resizing. This example is 2048 pixels wide by 1536 pixels high. A pixel is essentially a dot or a point. If you multiply the two, you'll see that this is a 3,145,728 pixel image, or approximately a 3 Megapixel picture. Some cameras today take 10 Megapixel photos, so you can imagine the size of those images.

The standard computer screen, or the resolution that most people select for doing their day-to-day work is 800x600 or 1024x768. Remembering the example above, that 3 Megapixel image was 2048 pixels wide. This is why on their computer screen people see only part of a picture that's emailed which hasn't been resized.

A web page is usually designed for the standard computer screen, or 800 pixels across. So if you are planning on displaying two pictures across on a web page, you want to resize your photo to be less than 400 pixels wide. I generally choose 250 pixels for the Rotary website.

Continuing with the example, I would next select the Size icon on the left side.

You can see there are lots of options for resizing on this page. I find it's easiest to use the Smart JPEG Resizing. I've used 250 pixels for the largest side. This means that a portrait type picture (long side up and down) will be resized to ?? x 250 and a landscape (long side left and right) will be resized to 250 x ??. The aspect ratio will be preserved, which means the full picture will be preserved but not distorted, e.g. squished or stretched.

Next, I'll click on the Output icon on the left:

At this point I do not recommend overwriting your original files as you may want them sometime later for making prints or other uses.

I'm storing the resized pictures in another location; in this case it's the Rotary web site folder on my computer. Choose your location by deleting the path in the Output Directory: box and clicking on Browse.

I've also used a handy feature of this program which renames the resized pictures. You can choose to keep the same filenames, but for this example, we'll end up with Santa1.jpg and Santa2.jpg for the two files we are resizing.

Finally, I prefer to use the lowest compression possible. This will keep the image quality high in the smaller picture. You can experiment with this setting to see how the pictures turn out.

In the last step, I click on the Resize icon on the left. This runs the resizing. You'll see a screen similar to the one below when the program has finished.

Now you can attach those resized pictures to your email message, or use them on a website.

Prepared by Dave Nadeau, Fort Collins Foothills Rotary Club, Webmaster, Dec 2006. All rights reserved.