Lets Talk About Picture Size

[George_Race]

I was browsing "A work In Progress" and looking at Pete's Sows Ear build. The first thing that stood out was the large high quality pictures he presents of all his beautiful work on the engine. On the first page, which seemed to load a bit slow for me, I added up about 7 Megabytes in high quality pictures. I have a high speed connection so it is really not a problem for me at the moment. A year or so ago, I had dial-up, and would never been able to look at Pete's great pictures, due to the download time over my slow dial-up link.

I bring all of this up because I think there are probably a lot of builders out there that are not able to download, in a reasonable time, some of the many great pictures on the HMEM Site.

I would like to offer a solution that will benefit us all, as an end result. Go to the following address and download the free program called "Greenshot."
http://getgreenshot.org

Greenshot is a small program that runs down in your task bar at the bottom right of your screen, and is called up anytime by pressing the PrtSc Key on your keyboard. It allows you to grab a pictures of anything that is on the screen at the time you press the PrtSc Key. One of the great things is that it is completely free to use, no popup advertising or anything, just a very nice easy to use program.

I have it set to capture in .jig format at 100% quality. That way what you get is exactly what you capture from your screen. And you can capture any part you want, small or large, so you get only the detail you want. Just like having a picture editor at your fingertips. It is saved automatically to your directory of choice, I use the "Desktop." Once saved, Greenshot has a very limited built in editor that lets you add text, arrows, lines, etc.. to your picture. This can be very helpful when trying to point out something on one of the pictures you have posted.

I have use Greenshot on two of Pete's pictures to show you the savings in size, but still convey all the detail of his original pictures. I even added a couple of comments to the first picture. Take a look below and see what you think. And, the picture Megabyte size is only about 10% of the size of the originals that were posted, so they load very fast, but still contain all the original picture detail.

If we all used this kind of picture posting, a lot of download time could be saved as well as a lot of space on the HMEM Program Server. And, we would not loose a thing in picture quality and even have an opportunity to easily add comments to our pictures, pointing out construction details to those looking in.

Please give it a try and see what YOU think!
George

 

[black85vette]

Other tools that are very useful include the "Snipping Tool" that comes with Windows 7.

"Paint.Net" is a fantastic photo editor with a lot of the features of PhotoShop but with one big plus ...... it is a totally free download.

The two together are fantastic. You can clip any part of your screen rather than the whole thing and then paste directly into your editor or app. Or you can save the clip in any format you want.

 

[b.lindsey]

George I fully agree. Little if anything is lost by reducing picture size to 640x480 or a maximum of 800x600. I happen to use Picassa which is also free and has a few more editing options but I convert everything to 640x480 and have since this topic was raised a while back. It can really help those with slower coneections and server space as well, particualrly since we all LOVE pics so much here. Even with a fast connection some larger pics can take a while to load.

Bill

 

[JorgensenSteam]

You can always hit the "Print Screen" button on your keyboard, and then open a photo program, and use the "Paste" command to paste whatever was on the screen into the photo program, and save it as a JPG file.

You can then crop out what you don't want.
You don't need third-party software to do this unless you want some features beyond this.

Pat J

 

[Troutsqueezer]

640x480 is too small. 800x600 is good.

I like the larger pictures because what's in the background is just as interesting to me as the subject of the photograph.

 

[mklotz]

I believe that Photobucket automatically reduces large pictures to 800 x 600 when you upload them.

As a test, I uploaded the 3648 x 2736 (about 4 meg) original of this picture to my Photobucket account, selected the "img" link and inserted it here.

When I right click on the image and select "view image info", it says it's 800 x 600 (about 780 kbytes).

Note that, even at 800 x 600, the picture is slightly too large and one must scroll to see the right hand side - at least that's the case on my computer/monitor.

 

[GailInNM]

On Photobucket on the upload page there is a set custom upload options link. If you click it you can set the size that it resizes to. There are a variety of predefined standard sizes.

I keep mine set fairly large as I crop and resize in an editor before uploading. If the upload is smaller than what you have set in Photobucket then it leaves it alone.

If there is nothing that requires a lot of detail then I mostly use 320 x 240 for routine in progress photos, but have them cropped to show just what is necessary. Then I use larger formats for finished assemblys where I want to show a more detailed look. With 320 x 240 I can put two photos side by side.

Gail in NM

 

[mklotz]

Thanks for pointing that out, Gail. I didn't remember that feature. I guess I must have set it when I first signed on to Photobucket and, over the years have forgotten that it was adjustable.

I suppose that we should point out that, if you have a slow upload connection, it's still better to resize your pictures locally and then upload them.

 

[dgjessing]

You know you can just go into you're camera's configuration menu and set it to take smaller size pictures (640 x 480, for instance). Then you don't have to screw around with re-sizing them.

Just remember to jack it back up to huge before that Grand Canyon trip ;D

 

[rodw]

Irfanview is a free program with a batch mode downsampling option. I use it to set the long edge to 800 pixels and save pics in a LoRes folder. More recently I use Lightroom and have a photobucket plugin for it which lets me downsample and upload to Photobucket in one step with no more intervention.

 

[Sshire]

When we talk about pixel size of the image, that is only half of what must be considered.
The other half is screen resolution.
The screen on my Macbook Pro is set to display 800 (V ) x1280 (H) pixels. An image at a resolution of 800 (V) x600 (H), will display with the image height filling the screen and the width occupying a bit less than ½ of the screen.
Now, lower the screen resolution to 800 (V) x 600 (H) and the image will fill the screen.
If the image is horizontally oriented (800H x 600V) the top or bottom will not be visible on screen.

Also, unrelated to resolution is JPEG compression. To reduce file size while maintaining pixel size, the compression algorithm must eliminate some detail. JPEG uses "lossy" compression. The greater the compression, the crappier the image.
Virtually all of the "free" JPEG compressors use a VERY lossy algorithm. The good (i.e. not free) compressors use a much better method to retain more detail. Just to make things worse, each time you open a JPEG image and make any change (lighten, darken, crop, etc) and save that change, more detail is lost.

FYI

 

[rodw]

When we talk about pixel size of the image, that is only half of what must be considered.
The other half is screen resolution.
The screen on my Macbook Pro is set to display 800 (V ) x1280 (H) pixels. An image at a resolution of 800 (V) x600 (H), will display with the image height filling the screen and the width occupying a bit less than ½ of the screen.
Now, lower the screen resolution to 800 (V) x 600 (H) and the image will fill the screen.
If the image is horizontally oriented (800H x 600V) the top or bottom will not be visible on screen.

Also, unrelated to resolution is JPEG compression. To reduce file size while maintaining pixel size, the compression algorithm must eliminate some detail. JPEG uses "lossy" compression. The greater the compression, the crappier the image.
Virtually all of the "free" JPEG compressors use a VERY lossy algorithm. The good (i.e. not free) compressors use a much better method to retain more detail. Just to make things worse, each time you open a JPEG image and make any change (lighten, darken, crop, etc) and save that change, more detail is lost.

FYI

Picture size online is determined by the web page template used to format the display. a width of 800 pixels is generally the widest you can go without formatting issues when the page is viewed. 640 is too small in my view.

Most conversion programs that are any good (including the free Irfanview) provide control over the amount of compression applied. 75%-100% will yield good results basically undetectable form the full resolution pic. Most JPEG routines are based on open source libraries produced to comply with the standards. (eg. open source embedded in a commercial program).

Finally, do yourself a favour and downsample your photos before upload to conserve bandwidth and speed upload times. Why upload a big pic to have the data thrown away at the other end? Never made sense to me!

 

[dnalot]

You can have your cake and eat it too. Most photos have way too many colors. The file size can be reduced by simply reducing the number of colors used. Reducing the number of colors generally has no effect on the quality of the photo.

Mark T