Why Are my Digital Pictures so HUGE?
Well, you have your first digital camera and have taken lots of pictures (or perhaps you have scanned in some snapshots using a scanner). You have looked at your pictures on the computer. Wow! These are great! Isn’t it amazing that you can see your pictures right after you’ve taken them? Now you can share them immediately with your family all over the world! Isn’t technology wonderful? So you send out your 5 best pictures in an email.
Unfortunately, you probably got emails (or phone calls) back saying that the pictures were great, but they were bigger than the whole computer screen! Or that they sure took a long time to download… or worse, that they crashed someone’s email and they had to call their internet provider to clear it out (this can happen on dial up connections).
So what happened? The pictures looked perfectly fine on your computer, didn’t they? You zoomed out to make them a comfortable size before sending, right? Read on to find out about one of the nuances of digital photography:
Here’s the problem: The digital camera takes pictures for printing. That means that they must be very detailed so the picture can be sharp. A spot of color or part of the picture is called a pixel. The more pixels you can get into the picture, the more detailed/sharp the picture appears. (If you zoom into a picture really close, the lines become jagged. The little boxes are the individual pixels.) The camera puts as much detail into the image as it can. The more detail, the bigger the computer file needed to contain it. The bigger the file, the longer it takes to send and download… and a lot of images could exceed the file size limit set by internet providers or some virus software.
Okay, that explains the slow loading/crashing of the images in someone’s email, but what about the size of the pictures on their computer screens?
These pictures look so huge on people’s computer screens because of the way the computer screens display images. The computer displays a specific number of pixels in the viewing area. This is called the screen resolution. (If you are curious to see what your screen resolution is, right click on a blank area of your desktop. In the menu that pops, select “properties.” Then at the top, click on a tab marked “settings” and look in the left column. If you are interested, mine says “1280 by 1024″ so I have a lot of pixels per inch on my screen.)
Example: Let’s say I want to send my mom a picture I took with my digital camera. I have uploaded the picture to my computer. Right clicking on the picture on my computer and selecting “properties” (or depending on what version of Windows you have, you might see the details of the picture in the left column of your pictures folder) you can see some basic information about your picture file. Straight from my camera, my picture’s dimensions are 2592 by 1944 pixels and the size of the computer file is 2.17 MB (megabytes).
Say my mom’s screen resolution is 800 by 600 pixels. Not only will her computer spend time downloading over 2 megabytes of digital information for one picture, she will only see the first 800 of the 2592 pixels across and the first 600 of the 1944 pixels down of your image. And probably not even that much, since some of those 800 viewing pixels the monitor allows will be used up by the email window! The rest of the picture is still there, but she will have to scroll around with her mouse to see it. Here is a digital photograph as it comes from my camera. (If you have a recent version of your browser, it may reduce the picture so you can see it on your screen. Click the picture so you can see it at 100%.)
Wait a minute! You previewed the picture on your screen and it looked fine! Or maybe you even opened up your picture in the photo editing program that came with your camera and zoomed out so you could see the whole picture and saved it. It was the right size when it left your computer, right? WRONG! Here’s why:
Probably the best way to explain this is in a non-digital way: your picture file is like a 4 x 6 inch snapshot. The windows preview/zoom feature is like a magnifying glass. You move the magnifying glass in and out over the snapshot and the snapshot appears to get bigger or smaller. But it is not ACTUALLY bigger… it is still a 4 x 6 inch snapshot you’re viewing. If you want to mail this snapshot to someone, you stick it in an envelope and mail the actual snapshot at the actual size.. not your view of the snapshot at apparent size shown in the magnifying glass.
Look at some of the pictures you have on your computer. Right click one and select “preview” from the menu that pops up. In the picture preview window on your computer, you can hold down the “ctrl” key while pressing the “a” key (ctrl + a) to see the actual size of your image (or rest your cursor on the buttons at the bottom… one of them will say “actual size”).
If you are saavy enough to use your photoediting software, open the picture in your editing program. To see the ACTUAL size of the picture, click on “view” or “zoom” at the top and select “actual size” or “100%” or the equivalent.
So in order to comfortably mail images for viewing on a computer screen, the actual size of the image should be reduced. Keep watching Witchy Tech! I am going to show you an easy and free way to fix your images for emailing and sharing online. Your family and friends are going to be so impressed with YOU!
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Great article Witchy. I have been known to have this problem. You are providing a great service for us not so tech savvy people.