Photo Email Etiquette

Today's post deals with a HUGE pet-peeve of mine. HUGE. (In fact, I'm going to tag it under Pet-Peeves for future reference; I'm sure that a few more will pop up in the future ;).

The tip & pet-peeve is this: people who insist on emailing you photos and clogging up your email because they don't know how to reduce the size of the jpeg. Has this ever happened to you? I'm sure it has. Like when, say, you log into your email software and it spends about 5 minutes "thinking" about the "Send & Receive" function. And then when all of the emails finally come through, you realize that your sister-in-law has sent you ten 2 MB each pics of your nephew. (and they are all always unfailingly the same shot of the kid).

People, there is a way to share your pics with friends and family and not infuriate us. There are actually a few options.

The first option is one that I would recommend if you don't have any sort of image-editing software (such as Photoshop). Set up a free account with Shutterfly or Flickr or Yahoo!Photos and this will then allow you to create online albums of your images and send a simple, tiny LINK of those albums to your family & friends. These sites also let you organize the photos how you want, create fun little borders & captions, and people can view them as a slideshow on their screen.

The second option takes a bit more time and saavy, but is still really easy. It involves using Photoshop or other such image-editing software. There are two ways to reduce image size in Photoshop. First open the image and then click on the "Image" file menu. Click on the "Image Size" option, and the window that you see below will pop up:

Make sure that you have the "Constrain Proportions" option checked, and you should also check "Resample Image." This will make sure that your image will not be distorted horizontally or vertically; it will only allow the software to change the density of the pixels within the image and it's overall proportions & size. Then change the resolution to 72 pixels/inch (this is all the resolution you need to view properly online and create the smallest file size). You can also change the actual dimensions to make them smaller, and at the same time lower the resolution if you want. Experiment with this and see what yields a reasonable final file size (TIP: check the file properties when the file is closed and saved to see what size it will show up as when you email it and/or upload it).

The other, and simpler, way to reduce file size is by using the "Save As" function. Go to the "File" menu, and click on "Save As." Name your file and choose a location to save it to, and click "Save." The following window will pop-up next:
Here you can choose the quality of the final saved file using the slide at the top. Usually even a "low" quality image is just fine for email and the internet. The degree of the quality in this case refers to the file compression when the software saves the image.

If you are one of those people who like to send lots of pics and have perhaps performed the pet-peeve faux-pas I speak of in today's blog, consider yourself warned and hopefully remedied. :)

Cheers,

Geek Girl

PS-Do YOU have questions about technology-related stuff that YOU want answered? Email me at geek.girl@earthlink.net