Attention People: Resize… Then E-mail

One of the things that continually frustrates me is when people decide they want to share the photos from their recent vacation with you. They send an email to everyone in their address book (in the To:) field and attach as many photos as they can in their e-mail program at the standard resolution provided by their digital camera of choice.

Let’s talk about the size difference of these photos.

In the example image above the attached photo would be almost 2.5MB for a single photo. I’m not sure what the limits are in most email programs or what the restrictions are by ISP’s, but this is a chunk of file weight to be flying around the Internet.

Take a moment and resize your images before sharing them with family and friends. You can use tools within Windows, or my preference for quick, dirty and FREE resizing is IrfanView. (I wrote recently about my Favorite Graphics Programs here.) There’s also a nice Windows PowerToy utility Image Resizer that also makes it very easy for casual computer users.

Let’s look at the difference that can be achieved with resizing and resampling a picture that’s better for appropriate sharing via e-mail.

The image above has been resized to 500 x 375 pixels dimensions and to 81.5kb in size. As you can see the quality is still good and anyone reviewing  the photos should be able to get the full enjoyment of the photo. On the other hand the original image is 3072 x 2074 pixels dimensions and the 2.41MB in size. That’s a reduction of more than 95% of the original size of the file, while still maintaining a high quality view of the image for your friends and family.

Of course the other option would be to not send anything through email and instead share your photos on a variety of free photo sharing sites that are available like flickr, Picasa, Photrade, Windows Live Gallery and many others.