Image Sizing

[shorty]

I've been trying to tidy up my computor files and as well as doing the usual "disc clean up" and "defrag" to make more space I have noticed that a lot of images that people post are of the magnitude of 20 Kb or less.
When I scan photos they are normally in excess of 1 Mb and I think I am pretty clever if I can get them down to under 500 Kb.
Obviously some people are far cleverer at it than I am and I could really free up some more space, so, what's the secret?

What I have been doing is opening the image in MSPaint and reducing it's size by 50 % , I would very much appreciate learning a more effective method

[kb]

Shorty, for small files first thing is to make sure that photo is saved as jpeg. I don't know whether you can do this in MSPaint but in photoshop I reduce the size to about 1200 by 800. This will usually give a file of about 50kb which fills the average computer screen as these display at 72dpi. Hope this helps

[ErrolC]

Nov 4, 2010 17:21:27 GMT 12 kb said:

Shorty, for small files first thing is to make sure that photo is saved as jpeg. I don't know whether you can do this in MSPaint but in photoshop I reduce the size to about 1200 by 800. This will usually give a file of about 50kb which fills the average computer screen as these display at 72dpi. Hope this helps

Photoshop, as well as less sophisticated programs, often have the ability to specify 'jpeg quality'. Typically set to something like 90%, this can be further reduced.
Another trick is removing the EXIF data. Nearly all cameras record various settings when the photo is taken (but scanners don't), and store the data in the jpeg. Some programs make it easy to delete this info - can be 10s of kb from memory.

If doing batch resizing (e.g. making copies of photos I have tweaked & edited in GIMP of an appropriate size for Flickr) I use Faststone from www.faststone.org, adding a watermark while I am at it.

[Dave Homewood]

Shorty it depends on the initial resolution you're scanning at. These days I always scan photos at a high resolution, for example if it's a nice photo I'll do it at around 1200dpi and at 150% or so, but that makes for a massive file size of about 6MB or more. I do it large because you never know when you might need it in a larger format for something, and if you borrowed the photos as i often do it's hard to make the small file bigger at a later date.

When resizing for the internet, as well as resizing the with (I stick to 1000 pixels wide usually) I do this in Photoshop and when I save it as a new name that program asks if I want to alter quality, and shows a sliding scale of 1 to 12, with 12 being the highest quality. If you knock it down to 8 or so it reduces the file size markedly without too much detriment to visual quality, and the same width.

Going back to the initial scan, if you set the resoluution to about 250 dpi you get a small file anyway and don't need to resize it often, depending on the size of the original picture.

[Bruce]

For Quick resizing / compression without fancy software, I generally use Microsoft Picture Manager which is part of the latest Windows 7 / Microsoft Office 2010 suite. It has a nice simple resize / compress feature that seems to produce pretty good results.

[mumbles]

Nov 4, 2010 18:31:23 GMT 12 Bruce said:

For Quick resizing / compression without fancy software, I generally use Microsoft Picture Manager which is part of the latest Windows 7 / Microsoft Office 2010 suite. It has a nice simple resize / compress feature that seems to produce pretty good results.

Second that. I use picture manager as well and it is a simple and effective tool for resizing and basic editing. If scanning pictures I don't go much higher than 600 dpi; once the image is resized smaller the lower resolution isn't too bad, and the savings in kb are huge.

Any image I put on-line from any source I will size down to 800x600 as a minimum, and put some compression on it as required (usually to 'document' in MPM). Often the resizing will reduce the image size to below 500kb anyway (from 10.2 Mp full size images). I try not to post anything above around 300kb.

[shorty]

Thanks guys, I'll try some of those suggestions when I have my next session.
Yes I do save everything as JPEGs