How to reduce the size of your pics to upload

[JerryM100]

Guys,
For those of you who upload pics for us all to see here, first of all - THANK YOU! It is great to see everyone and see the places you go!

However, it is time consuming to upload all those pics and they take up a lot of space on the server. An average point-and-shoot camera these days will be 12 mega-pixel, or 16 or 20 mp! They take great quality pics but the files are HUGE! Like 2 or 3 or maybe 4 megabytes each. If you upload those here to the forums it can take a looooooong time.

But the extra quality of the pics is lost when you display them here. The pics you take could be 2000 or 2400 pixels wide but this screen is about 1000 pixels wide, so the rest is wasted.

So to save you time and save me space on the server please reduce your pictures before you upload them - and here is how you can do it.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m3J7yHnMtLA

By they way, if you need a refresher on how to upload pics to the forums here go see my previous post here:

viewtopic.php?f=9&t=3163

Thanks for trying it out!

Jerry M
Your Favorite Webmaster

[Harley-Charlie]

Jerry - Interesting and useable, especially if you want to use the photos as they are made with no editing. Below is my process, is it acceptable?
I post photos weekly, if not more often. My Nikon's make whopping 36meg photos, 7360X on the large side. I like and use Adobe Photoshop. I'll open the photos in Photoshop, edit and crop. Then I resize, usually 800 to 825 on the large side. I post the finished photos to the south central board.

[JerryM100]

Yes, Harley Charlie, your process is perfectly acceptable! OMG, 36 meg pics! And 7300px horiz resolution! This is a good example of what I am talking about.

A lot of people here don't really understand all this tech stuff, so I want to keep it relatively simple. And most people don't have access to Photoshop, which is the gold standard for photographic and graphic editing (costs HUNDREDS of dollars). You use Photoshop to achieve just what I need - smaller pics on the website.

The basic concept is to reduce your photos to 800x or 1024x or maybe 1200x as the horizontal resolution. Basically a pixel is a unit of display equal to 1/72 of an inch, if I recall. So there are 72 pixels in an inch of display on a computer monitor. That's why I said the screen you are looking at (depending on the size of your monitor) is about 1000 pixels wide. (Actually it is the width of your browser window that matters.) 1000 divided by 72 is a little less than 14 inches. So any picture you post to our forums here (or anywhere they are displayed on a monitor) will be shown that wide and any extra detail will be wasted.

Put another way, Harley Charlie's 36 meg, 7360 pix photo will only show approx 1000 pixels if he posted it like that and all the extra detail is lost and the space it takes up on the drive is huge and not needed.

It takes just a little extra time to do the conversions but we really need to reduce the space all the pics are taking up on the server.

Thank You!!!

Jerry

[Harley-Charlie]

If using Photoshop..
How I resize my biggie photos: Click Image, Image Size. Set the Resolution to 72. Set the larger size (aka Pixel Dimensions, which will be Width on a horizontal photo) to 800 (my usual choice) or as much as 1024. The smaller number will set itself (if not, confirm that the Constant Proportions is checked). Quick and simple.
Charlie

[JerryM100]

Here is a more recent article that reviews various online photo resizers. Compare and choose one and play with it. (This is for people who don't have Photoshop.)

13 Best Free Photo Resizers - https://www.lifewire.com/free-photo-resizers-1357016

[arkyleo]

Thanks Jerry: I have just been using my little Canon Powershot A1200 on LARGE--but I will now reduce it to 1200 megapixels right in the camera. I usually color correct and sharpen before posting,

[JerryM100]

I recently discovered another way to reduce the size of your pics. There is a browser app called squoosh.app. If you enter that in any browser you can figure out the various dimensions and resolutions you want. The thing to know is you then have to download it to your local device (PC, Mac, iPad, iPhone or Android). Then you have to find that file and upload it to the forums here. A little tricky but if you do it a couple of times it is a new, neat way to manage your file sizes.

I hope someone finds this useful!