Most digital (jpeg) cameras give you several options for photo "quality." However, all this does is change the size of the image you're taking. When taking photos for the web, it's usually a waste of time to use any more than the lowest quality setting.

For instance, on this site's photo page, the largest that any image will be displayed is 800 x 800 pixels. So anything larger is wasted. If you put up a photo that is sized at, say, 2400 x 1800 pixels, it will still only show at 800 x 800 but will take a long time to upload and a long time to load when others look at it.

And you should save images for use on the web (or for email) as jpeg files, Not RAW or Tiff files. Those are far too large and unnecessary for use on the web.

So, just as a suggestion, if you have image editing software, reduce/resample your images to about 72 dpi and resize to roughly 600 x 600 pixels or so. You'll find that your photos show up quite large and yet load very fast. If you go direct from your camera, move to the lower quality setting which will give you a good photo but in a smaller size. Just a tidbit to make your photo page experience a little better.

(For Bill Stevens - no this isn't necessarily aimed at you, but your large images sizes did prompt me to make mention of it to everyone else. Keep on flocking.)

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Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 04/10/2005 10:39PM by Tom Kirkman.

It does take quite a bit of the "blow-up" quality out when they're re-sized like this, doesn't it? I played with one image, 1200 x 1800, that I had and brought it down to 401 x 600 and saved it as such. When I reopened it in Windows Fax Viewer and enlarged it, the resolution of the original picture was totally gone.

It works for viewing purposes very well, though, I suppose.

Putter
Williston, ND

Tom, I often copy the images on the photo page and import them into one of my viewing programs, so that I can adjust brightness and (especially) enlarge selected areas of the image so that I can examine details of the thread work, that has helped this novice a lot. with some of the smaller images, this can't be done effectively. I'm not sure yet what a "reasonable" size that would allow this is.