Photo Guidelines, Hints, and Suggestions

[Pauldog]

Photos are more than welcome here, and many people have posted exceptionally good photos, but we want to avoid having our computers getting bogged down trying to download huge files, as well as conserve space on our server.

If you don't have a means to edit photos, try IrfanView, which is free (www.irfanview.com) and runs on Windows. If you have a Mac, I assume you have photo editing software. And I'm sure there's decent free photo editing software for Linux.

1) Save your photo files as JPG or PNG or GIF. For JPG, reduce the quality to perhaps 65%. Experiment with the quality setting to reduce the file size without hurting the quality. If PNG, set compression to the maximum.

2) Crop your photo to remove most of the background.

3) Reduce the picture size of large photos, unless you need to show a particular detail, and then it may be better to show that detail in a separate photo. The idea being that the total size of the two photos could be noticeably less than the size of one very large one.

3) Try to keep photo file sizes down to 100K or less. This is a rough guideline, but I've seen many 500K photos that could easily be reduced down to about 100K without compromising anything except a grand view of a tabletop.


Any further tips and suggestions are welcome here.

[Hoos]

I second the vote for irfanview. Great program. Just uncheck the Yahoo or Google toobar option (I forget which one they include) unless you want it.

I've also found that reducing image size to 800 x 600 pixels seems to be good for viewing - people don't have to scroll all over the screen to see the image. As long as that size falls within Pauldog's guidelines above.

[Pauldog]

800 x 600 pixels

What kind of file size do you get?

[Hoos]

Resizing to 800x600 pixels and saving as a .jpg (at the 85% best quality level) in Irfanview gives me different file sizes (depending on original photo quality, I guess) from 60kb - 125kb. Based on four different photos. Three of them were under 100kb. Only one resized photo was 125.

[Sando]

I see where I am at fault here. I've been resizing instead of compressing.
I get it now.

...Ray

[Lyrt]

Wow, these new guidelines are depressing, but fine, I'll comply with them.

[Pauldog]

I see where I am at fault here. I've been resizing instead of compressing.
I get it now.

...Ray

You can do both.

[Pauldog]

Wow, these new guidelines are depressing, but fine, I'll comply with them.

It's not a requirement, more of a suggestion. If you have very detailed photos and have nothing to crop out of them, we can live with that. I just wanted to stop the attack of the depressing blurry 500K TIFFs.

Sometimes just setting a JPG to 75% will cut the file size by a lot without affecting the appearance.

[drmoss_ca]

I think the intention is not to limit quality, but image size in terms of pixels. It messes up a whole thread if someone posts a photo that is wider than the average browser window - you have to keep scrolling from side to side to read each line of text after that. It is true that those of us on dial-up connections would prefer not to have images several MB in size, but even those with some form of broadband are going to find an image 1500 pixels wide a pain in the ass when it comes to reading the thread. For forum purposes I think it reasonable to stick to the 512kB limit imposed by the SMF gallery and resize the image to a width of 900 pixels. If anyone has a photo they are particularly proud of in terms of photographic excellence (you might consider yourself in this category, Yukio) it is reasonable to post a version here that is of the size above, and link to a full resolution image on your own web server or make it available by yousendit.com to those who want the full version.

Chris

[Squire]

I wondered why some threads take on that wide load appearance.

[Lyrt]

Thank you for the clarification. Then I’ll just stop posting 1024x680 pictures and go back to the 800x530 format. I kind of suspected it could ruin the layout of the pages of those with monitors with a resolution below 1280x1024.

[jww]

I second the vote for irfanview. Great program. ...

+1 - I first heard about this app on this forum, and use it all the time now.

[drmoss_ca]

Mac users can look out Graphic Convertor as a cheap and powerful shareware image manipulator.
http://www.lemkesoft.com/

Chris

[fish]

As a Mac user myself, we have several features to easily manipulate the file size.

• For starters, the "File, Export" feature of iPhoto is what I personally use.
  
  With Preview, just select "Tools, Adjust Size".

If any Mac user needs further assistance or advice, feel free to send me a message.

[ChemErik]

Irfanview is good for very basic tasks, but I'd recommend GIMP if you want to do editing. It free, open source, and available on Windows and Linux, not sure about Mac.

[ThePossum]

Irfanview is good for very basic tasks, but I'd recommend GIMP if you want to do editing. It free, open source, and available on Windows and Linux, not sure about Mac.

I second the suggestion about using GIMP. Just learning how to use it as my newest computer runs Linux. But seems to be an easy learning experience.

[phule]

Irfanview is good for very basic tasks, but I'd recommend GIMP if you want to do editing. It free, open source, and available on Windows and Linux, not sure about Mac.

GIMP for Mac OS X can be found at http://gimp.lisanet.de/Website/News/News.html

[Ouchmychin]

I want to warn members that when I downloaded Infanview from their site it filled my hard drive with many files that took over my computer and refused to be removed When control panel uninstall failed and I got a blue screen I had to turn off the computer and reboot in safe mode to get to a restore point before the download and do a complete system restore to get rid of that stuff. I think their site must have been taken over by hackers.

[brothers]

Maybe the old link from 2012 can be deleted? That's up to the mods/admin of course.

[drmoss_ca]

Gary,
The 2012 link was for GIMP. The link to Irfanview's site came at the start of the thread and dates back to 2008. While I avoid Windows as far as I can because life is short, I am under the impression it is still regarded as a generally respectable application.

You do seem to have a fondness for very old threads.

Chris