Resizing Images for Email

     - Saturday, December 27, 2003

This article is for everyone who just got a digital camera for the holidays. You need a little lesson about file sizes. All those pretty pictures you're emailing are gigantic, both in image size and file size. Let's talk about image size first. This is the actual physical size of the photo, measured in height and width. Instead of measuring in inches, the height and width is measured in pixels, which is short for picture element. The more pixels, the bigger the image. Most cameras take pictures with lots of pixels. For example, my brother's camera is set with 1600 pixels across (width) by 1200 pixels tall (height). My mom's camera defaults to 1280 x 960. Both produce great pictures with lots of detail.

Here's the problem, my screen resolution is 1024 pixels across by 768 pixels high. Many people's screen is only 800 x 600. So, when I view a picture that's bigger than my screen, one of 2 things happens: Either I can't see the whole picture and I have to use the scroll bars, or the picture is resized to a smaller image so it fits my screen.

By itself, overly large physical dimensions of an image isn't such a bad thing. But all that extra detail comes at a cost: It makes the image file size much bigger than necessary. Not only do big files take longer to download, but if you're using a free email account, such as Hotmail, they can quickly fill up your inbox.

How big are the files? Each picture is about 300 to 450 kb. An email with 4 pictures will take about 10 minutes to download if you're using a dial-up internet account. That one email will also completely fill up a hotmail inbox. Not so good.

But there is good news. You can easily resize your images before emailing them so that the image size is smaller (and therefore the file size is smaller too) without losing quality. If you're using Windows XP, the easiest way to do this is to install Microsoft's Image Resize Power Toy. Click on the link and then click Open to install.

After the installation, you'll be able to right-click on image files and select "Resize Pictures". You can then choose to resize your picture to 640 x 480 by clicking OK. You can even select multiple files and resize them all at once.

The new smaller files will be 10 times smaller than the original. (45 kb vs. 450 kb) Instead of taking 10 minutes to download, it'll only take a couple seconds. Ah, instant gratification. Now get emailing those pictures.

See Also:
Email Basics
Resizing Images for Email - Part 2

posted by Kevin Watts |  Permalink |