Help With Photo Uploads

The most common problem we see with photo uploading is from trying to upload a photo larger than the limit of one megabyte (1MB). Today's digital cameras, even cell phone cameras, routinely take photos smaller than this but when they are converted to other image formats they can "grow." Images that are scanned from a print may also be much larger than 1MB because they may have been saved in an inefficient format (TIFF is an example). Professional digital images may be taken in the "RAW" format, where the image could routinely be as large as 18MB.

Because the gallery contains so many photos, and because many email gateways limit the size of file attachments, we have set a limit of 1MB on these images. An "JPEG" image from any digital camera should easily meet this requirement. However, if you have a scanned image or an image file delivered by a professional camera, you may need to resize it.

How do I reset the size of the image?

Your digital camera or cell phone probably came with software that will do this. If you are comfortable with that software, you can simply use it to set the image size. Refer to the user manual for that software.

If you do not have software to do this, you may use image software that came with your computer. Windows Paint program (found under Accessories in the Start menu) will do the job. The Macintosh will have similar programs. Windows users can also Google for "PC Image Editor" to download a free image editing tool that has lots of capabilities.

How Do I Choose the Settings?

The most important factor is the file type. For photographs the optimum tradeoff between size and quality is usually JPEG (.jpg). Most cameras automatically store images in this compressed format. If you scan the image from a print, you may need to specifically select the JPEG format. Scanners often use a non-compressed format (like TIFF) by default.

Assuming your digital camera is fairly "typical" you can set the largest pixel dimension on your photo to 600 or less and be sure that your JPEG file will be much smaller than the 1MB limit.

What about dots per inch (dpi)? You can ignore this property for this purpose. This property is used more for printing than for on-screen display.

Using Windows Paint to Resize Image

1. Open Windows Paint (located at Start > All Programs > Accessories >Paint)
2. Open your photo file (or drag and drop it onto Paint).
3. Select "Attributes" from the Image menu and see the Attributes dialog box.
4. Note the "Size on disk:" attribute from the top. This very large file is 985,653 bytes, which is less than the 1MB limit. The pixel dimension is huge, but because this is a JPEG file the size is quite reasonable.

1. Also note the width and height, given in pixels. This image is 1596 pixels wide and 2400 pixels high.
2. For our use in the gallery, we want to reduce the pixel dimensions of this file. This file is much larger than it needs to be for display in a web browser. A reasonable size is around 600 pixels for the largest dimension.
3. Since the image is currently 2400 pixels tall, we need to reduce the size to 25% of its current value to get 600 pixels. Select Image > Resize/Skew and see the dialog box below. Simply change the Horizontal and Vertical values to 25% and click OK.

Now save your image (a new filename is recommended). This example file went from its original size of just over 985,000 bytes to just over 40,000 bytes by reducing these dimensions. It will make a perfect image for display in a web browser.

Using Other Programs

Some image programs may not offer a percentage reduction option. They may allow you to simply set the size directly in pixels. In that case, set the largest dimension to 600 and the smallest to 450 pixels (assuming your photo is a typical 3:4 aspect ratio).