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Pic on Someone Your Own Size - Resizing Photos for Friendly Email Use

08 June, 2009 in Video/Graphics

When broadband first became widespread, emailed batches of pictures were the bane of any dial-up internet customer, because they almost assuredly meant an all-night ordeal trying to get the pictures downloaded and saved. With broadband internet now so ubiquitous, this aspect of the picture problem is no longer very noticeable (although there are still a few internet users here and there using dial-up), but there are still many ISPs and email providers that cap the attachment size for emails at 2 MB.

Fortunately, there is a quick and easy utility called Shrink Pic, which runs in the background and automatically resizes any images you email to a size of your choosing (we would generally recommend the medium compression option).

For those who don't want any extra programs cluttering up their background processes, however, reducing photograph file size is still very simple. Just open up Microsoft Paint (Start -> All Programs -> Accessories -> Paint) and use the "Image" menu's "Stretch/Skew" option.

Most digital cameras bloat their file size unnecessarily, so even changing the horizontal and vertical "stretch" to 99% each is frequently enough to cut an oversized file in half, but for emailing pictures, a horizontal and vertical stretch of 50% each will generally reduce a 2 MB image down to 400 KB at most, while still leaving the image more than large and crisp enough to see clearly.



So remember: the next time you want to send a large batch of images, make them email friendly first. Your friends will thank you!