Digital photo (pictures) too large for email?

Infopackets Reader Jodie K. writes:

" Dear Dennis,

When I take pictures with my digital camera and upload them on my computer, the pictures are very, very large! When I try to send in email, it takes forever to send my pictures to friends. I'd like to know how can I make my digital pictures smaller, so they won't take up so much space in emails. Thank you for any advice you can give! "

My response:

The short answer is that you will have to resize the picture before sending it off through email. By resizing the picture into a smaller resolution, the picture file size will also shrink (making it quicker to send through email).

The down side to shrinking a photo is that you will also lose image detail. A suitable resolution for email is 512x320 or 640x480; these are standard resolutions and the photo will fit nicely in an email. After the photo has been resized, I recommend that you save the image into .JPG format; this image format compresses photos very well and will help to keep the file size down.

How to Resize the Photo and Save it into .JPG format

Most digital cameras come with photo-editing software; unfortunately, many editors are substandard and do not offer the most basic of features. For all-purpose photo editing, I highly recommend ColorCoded PhotoStudio Pro. It can import photos directly from most digital cameras, and can easily edit / resize / and save your photo into .JPG image format. You can read the review of ColorCoded PhotoStudio Pro on our web site (with a link to download the program):

ColorCoded PhotoStudio Pro Review

If your photo file is already saved in BMP, GIF, JPG, PNG, or TIFF image format, you can use a freeware utility called "PIXresizer" to resize the image [and then save it into .JPG format if necessary]. From the PIXresizer web site:

" PIXresizer: Free Image Resizer / PIXresizer is a photo resizing program to easily create web and e-mail friendly versions of your images with reduced file sizes. The reduced files are saved in a different folder, so your original images are not altered at all. PIXresizer offers several different resizing methods to choose from and can automatically recognize image sizes to calculate the best fit. In addition, it can convert between image formats (JPEG, GIF, BMP, PNG and TIFF), rotate images, convert to grayscale and resize multiple images in batch mode. A great companion for webmasters and digital photographers. "

http://bluefive.pair.com/pixresizer.htm

Hope that helps ;-)