Resizing photographs

[barbelman]

It’s good to see photos on here from time to time but with modern digital cameras taking huge and highly detailed images, these can take up 5MB or more of memory per photo.  When these are attached to a message on the Forum they not only take up a relatively large amount of our allocated space for attachments, they are too big to display properly on screen.

Could users please make a copy of their image (I’m sure you’d want to keep the original) and downscale this to an appropriate size before attaching to your message.

I’m a Mac user and I use a small and very quick program called DroPic, which as the name suggests involves simply dragging the image into a box and choosing extra large,large, medium or small.  For instance a standard format 5.3MB photo (4336 x 2988 pixels) can be reduced to 233KB (1024 x 700), 147KB (800 x 550), 70KB (512 x 350) or 25KB (256 x 175)  

You can see there is a huge drop in memory usage and the photos are able to be seen in their entirety by all users.  I would recommend reducing to 1024 or 800 pixels (on the long side) for maximum impact.  Too small and it’s hard to see details in the photo.

Most photo processing programs for Windows have a facility for reducing the file size of images and something like Photoshop Elements, Paintshop or Picasa from Google (free) would be fine or use one of the many small dedicated freeware applications.  Always work on a copy remember and then you will still have the original if things go awry! :-/

Perhaps others may like to share their preference of photo-editing software for PC with us?

thanks
Tony

[Chris_Sav]

May I add to what Tony has correctly said in that we have a finite allocation of attachemnt space, though we are nowhere near it yet.

Prudent housekeeping will make sure that we do not run out of space in the years to come.

On the same subject I would much rather see sensibly sized attachments than the use of tinypic or photobucket type accounts. These third party free photo accounts will be lost to the forum when the poster ceases to use the account and the precious history lost to the forum.

Sav.

[SandyH]

Try IrfanView www.irfanview.com/ used it for years on my pc, its so easy to resize pics and not a bad editing tool either.  Its totally free to download too!

[barbelman]

A free image resizing program for Windoze was recommended to me by someone reliable this week;

pixresizer.en.softonic.com/

Tony

[Chris_Sav]

May remind members that, while we encourage the use of attachments over external free hosting sites, will they please be careful on the size of attachment used.

We are only allowed 250 meg total and, even after my going through and editing photo sizes down we are still hovering close to half full.

1 meg photo attachments eat up space incredibly quickly and I have found no way to limit size further.

Help appreciated

Sav

[Chris_Sav]

May I just politely remind posters of this thread please and request that photos added as attachments are reduced to sensible sizes. Attachments are the way forward as those on third party sites such as photoshop will ultimately be lost when user accounts cease to be used.

We now only have 50meg of our 200meg allocation free and with photos of over half a meg in size being added daily that will not last long. When that is gone someone is going to have to pay monthly charges to continue storage.

Attachments are the way forward but please use them economically.

[Chris_Sav]

May I once again remind posters to crop images to sensible sizes, preferably jpegs with compression.

PDF's should be saved in compressed format, if you don't know how there are plenty of sites on-line that will do it for you.

Our free attachment storage is still three quarters full to the 200meg limit and I have spent several hours over Christmas going through attachments, resizing and compressing them to try and save space.

I would like to keep using attachments for as long as possible. Central storage is the ONLY way our history can be preserved long term. Tinypic and photobucket free hosting accounts will all be lost a few months after their owner stops using them.

AEBBA might like to consider the  3$ a month additional storage charge when I eventually lose the battle which is inevitable

[Chris_Sav]

A reminder once again that photos must be a sensible size and compressed.

The forum is still desperately short of free image space and no one will pay monthly for additional space.

[Chris_Sav]

Photos are still being posted  that are unnecessarily large and/or not condensed despite requests from staff.

Please use attachments for essential pictures as no external hosting is as safe as this forum but please only post what is necessary and of a size to just convey the message, not a Banksy mural.

Please do not post PDF's of results sheets as attachments, use the 'tablify' function available from Excel data pasted into posts.

I'll be starting pruning on Monday, anything unnecessarily oversized or redundant (entry forms etc) will be removed. We must do this to be able to continue using attachments.

If you need help them PM me.