Are you aware that many of you are emailing digital photos off to friends and family incorrectly? The most common mistake is not resizing them before you send them off. Failing to do this means that peoples email box gets full and the images take a long time to download for those with slow internet connections.
The photos straight off your digital camera are about 1Mb (1000Kb) each. They are so large because they have a lot of detail enabling you to enlarge them (right up to 15″ x11″) and get them printed at a photo developers.
On the internet however we don’t need or want to see them this big. It is easy to downsize them to fit on a computer monitor (about 6″ x 4.5″) size and bring the file size down to 40Kb (50 times smaller).
Your options:
- Download and install a free photo album software called Picasa from picasa.com. Among other things, this amazing piece of software offers you one-click emailing which resizes your photos for you when emailing them. Click here to read more.
- Use a web based resizing service. There are a few websites that offer this such as resize2mail.com. You upload your photo to them, choose the size you want back, and then save the resulting image back to your computer. Unfortunately you are uploading a big photo which takes ages, and the whole process is rather time consuming. But it may be all you’ve got if you’re in an internet cafe.
- Get everyone you know to open a Gmail.com account. This free email service created by Google gives you 2GB of storage (and counting). Thats enough room for 1000 unoptimised photos or 50,000 optimised photos. It automatically creates thumbnails for quick loading too, to download the full size photo just click.
- Finally Windows XP has an “Email this file” option under “File and Folder Tasks”. Using this option will ask you if you want to resize the photo before emailing it. I don’t use Outlook so this doesn’t work for me. To find out more, read “method 2” on a tutorial I found, click here.
- Finally, you probably got software with your digital camera. It is likely the software includes a function that will resize photos for emailing. Learn how to use it!