Subscribe to this blog01 January 2006
Easy tricks to resize your digital pictures while traveling away from home
So, you are on a journey in this beautiful, remote place and want to share your digital photographs with your friends. But this great remoteness comes with a very slow Internet connection which prevents you from uploading or mailing your pictures.
What is even worse - and most likely to happen as well: The local Internet cafe (or the computer in the hostel) does not allow you to install software tools that would help you to resize your pictures for making them smaller before uploading.
Maybe the nerd who installed the computer did also disable "ActiveX" controls for Internet Explorer. Or he might not have bothered to install Sun's "Java" for Firefox. Both of these add-ons to the browsers would allow you to automate the on-the-fly resizing while uploading your pictures to sites, such as Facebook, Flickr or Picasa.
In such desperate situations, your only choice is to behave like MacGyver and use the raw software components that come as part of the Microsoft Windows operating system.
During my round-the-world trip I would encounter people albeit being computer literate, they would struggle tremendously in the mentioned scenarios. They would know the existence of "Paint", but not know how to use it to solve their problem at hand.
This is why I do share two very basic tricks that help you to shrink your pictures manually. Using this technique, you should be able to share your photographs - whether you have a slow Internet connection or a stubborn administrator who locked down software installations on his computers.
Caution: You definitely want to work on copies of your pictures. Never do these tricks directly on your originals sitting on the chip card from your camera. Before you start, copy your pictures to the computer and work from that folder.
- Optimize the picture file size without altering the picture dimensions:
Simply opening and then saving the picture using "Paint" will bring down the file size considerably.
The files from my camera (9 Megapixels) are between three to four Megabytes (Mb) in file size. After opening and saving them using "Paint", they shrink to somewhere between 0.7 Mb and 1.5 Mb in file size - without me being able to notice any visible difference. - Resizing picture dimensions for the web:
Oddly enough, "Paint" calls the resizing function something odd underneath the "Image" menu: "Expand or contract". On top of that, you need to specify the desired image dimensions as percentage value. There seems to be no way to specify the absolute number of pixels instead.
Therefore, the procedure of resizing image dimensions involves some calculation. However, if you never bother changing your camera's capturing resolution, then you will end up with the same picture dimensions all the times. Which means that you probably do the following math only once:
The formula is resizing value% = (target dimension * 100) / source dimension
Where target dimension and source dimension is always the widest side (depending on the picture orientation) of the image - to cater for both portrait and landscape shots.
The resizing value obviously should be entered into the respective two fields for the horizontal and vertical expansion values (to access this menu, select "Image" / "Expand or contract" from within Paint).
As an example, I do leave my camera's setting at always "9 Megapixel" resolution mode. This generates picture files with dimensions of 3456 x 2592 pixels. For the best fit into my blog's layout, I want these to have resized to roughly 450 pixels (at their longest side). My formula therefore reads: (450 * 100) / 3456. Which returns a resizing value of 13(%).
Where the heck can I find "Paint":
- On most computers, "Paint" is readily available through the "Start" menu (under "Programs" / "Accessories").
- If that has been hidden by a nerdy administrator, try to right-click on the picture file and select "Open with...", then select "Paint" from the list.
- If that had been disabled as well, try to run the program by pressing the "Windows"+"R" keys simultaneously. This will open a small window prompt, asking you which program to execute. Input "mspaint" and press the "Enter" key.
Note:
I am writing this on a Spanish computer in Latin America. Therefore, some of the menu items may not match the exact wording, since I was writing the instructions by trying to remember the wording.
Please let me know any of your comments, corrections, suggestions or additions to this tech tip.
Labels: Tech tips
posted by Reto at
21:52
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