Digital Downsizing
Christo van Gemert

Tired of clogging up the mailbox when e-mailing large photos?shows you how to get a handle on resizing them.Ever received a photo via e-mail, and it looked all wrong? Almost like it was too big to be displayed on screen all at once?

Computer screens, on average, have a display resolution of 1 280 pixels by 1 024 pixels. Newer, wide-screen models will have more lateral room, but nowhere near the dimensions of photos from modern digital cameras.

Look at it this way: the computer monitor is a window that is 1 280 pixels wide and 1 024 pixels high. When viewing – at 100% zoom – a large digital photo, it’s the equivalent of trying to look at a large billboard through a tiny window. To get the bigger picture, you’ll have to step away and use perspective to make things fit.

In the computer world this is the equivalent of zooming out, or simply rescaling a photo. The billboard remains the same size when you walk away - it just looks smaller.
To really make a difference, the photo needs to be resized. This will take the actual image file and make it smaller: when you open, e-mail or post it on Facebook, it will not take up the whole screen.
Not only will this make the photo smaller when viewing, it will also drastically reduce the file size. This means the internet data allowance will take a smaller hit. Sending ten photos at 100KB each is going to be a lot faster and less intensive than sending three, full-size 4MB photos.

Thankfully, it’s not complicated at all. Depending on the choice of computer (Windows or Mac), you’ll be able to use either a third-party utility or a pre-packaged application to do the resizing.
Windows users don’t have the luxury of a built-in software solution, but thanks to the internet there are a plethora of free applications that are more than capable. One such app, Pixresizer (http://bluefive.pair.com/pixresizer.htm), is really easy to set up. Simply fire it up, select the folder with all your photos and choose an output resolution. 

Another good utility is Google’s free photo management application called Picasa. It will also offer similar functionality, along with integrating into Google’s Picasa web albums and your e-mail client. Simply select the photos you want to share and it will automatically resize them before sending.
Mac users have things a bit easier, as per Apple’s unofficial mantra of “it just works.”
All Macs ship with Apple’s lifestyle software suite, iLife. One of the tools is called iPhoto – a photo library and retouching application.

In iPhoto, select the photos or album needing to be resized. Click “File” and then “Export”. This brings up a dialogue box where compression (JPEG Quality) and image size can be selected from drop-down menus.
Much like Picasa on Windows, iPhoto will also resize photos when e-mailing and uploading to Facebook or Flickr.

A good rule of thumb is to try to keep the horizontal resolution lower than 800 pixels for web use. If sharing stuff via e-mail, 1 024 pixels wide is good. Some tools also offer the option to choose the quality of the compression. For smaller photos, this can be dragged to 40% or 50%, while larger pictures will look better with less compression. Play around with the compression settings and see what the resized photos look like: highly compressed photos will appear blocky and have blotchy colours, while less-fiddled files will take up more disk space but look better.

Just remember, resizing photos is good for handling them digitally. A lot of quality will be lost when printing a resized image, so always try to keep the originals for print purposes.