Resize Your Images Online
In this day and age a lot more people are using digital cameras to take photos. It is certainly a lot more convenient and cheaper than the traditional film camera.
Whenever you go to buy a digital camera, the sales assistant will probably tell you that you need a camera with a lot of megapixels to take the best photos – 6 megapixels and above are now common place for consumer level cameras. Whilst it is true to some extent, we are going to explore how you use the image files from your Digital Camera.
If you are taking your images primarily for printing or to get developed at your local photo lab, then you need to ensure that your camera is configured to take the pictures at its maximum resolution and quality. At maximum quality the file size will increase. Typically a 4 megapixel image will be around 1.4 Meg in size. But let’s face it, the cost of flash cards has decreased in recent times and the lack of space on your memory card shouldn’t be a consideration for not taking the highest quality images your camera is capable of.
You can always do some Post Processing (PP) and resize you image and make it smaller. But, if you shoot a smaller resolution you can’t increase it too much in size without noticeable degradation of quality.
Most of your photos that you take, will not be printed but simply displayed on a computer screen. Even when you email your photos off to family or friends they will still only be looking at them on a computer screen. Now, this is where our PP comes into play.
Your Camera probably came with some bundled software that will help you do all sorts of things with your pictures from downloading them from the camera to emailing them. Quite often this software is difficult to learn how to use, and even when it is not, you still need to understand how a picture will be displayed in order to correctly process it.
Let us assume that we have a new baby in the Family and we have taken say 20 pictures and we want to share them with all of the family and our friends. You have a 4Megapixel Camera, and have taken all the pictures at maximum resolution and size because you will get some of them printed for yourself. Now, you have 20 picture files that are at around 1.5Meg each or a total of around 30Meg. Most of your friends would hate you if you were to simply attach all the pictures to an email and send them, especially if they were only using a modem - it would take them nearly 2 hours to download your 20 pictures.
Another aspect of the pictures that we have not talked about is the DPI or Dots Per Inch. DPI will be higher for higher quality pictures and is usually around 180. Your Computer screen is only capable of displaying 72DPI.
Now, some things to consider are how big does the photo need to be to send off in an email message? In most cases, a photo that is around 800x600 at 72DPI is all that is required to display your photo on the screen. Firstly, before doing any post processing, make sure you save the original files, and then work with a copy of them - if you modify the original it is gone.
If you are looking for a simple way to resize your images and optimise them for viewing on a computer screen without the need to download, install or learn a new software package take a look at - Shrink Pictures - it's a website that you can upload your pictures resize and resample them to 72DPI with just a few mouse clicks.
If you want, you can also automatically apply some special effects including grey scale and sepia toning.
Additionally, lots of websites with forums allow you to personalise your settings by placing an avatar or thumbnail image next to your posts. This normally is a reflection of your character. If you have an image which you would like to use but it is too big why not create your own avatar. The added benefit of this tool is not only does it resize your image but also crops it as a square.
So, why not resize your digital photos for FREE!