What to do with photos for websites and e-mail...

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This question was answered on June 19, 2000. Much of the information contained herein may have changed since posting.

Pictures do a great job of enhancing a website and they can be wonderful to receive via e-mail. Make them too large and they can chase away a potential viewer or cause the recipient of your e-mail to curse your children because of long download times. The most common mistake made, especially on websites, is the use of the wrong file format for saving the image. The two most common file types that are used for images are *.JPG and *.GIF. The general rule of thumb is use *.JPG for photographic images and *.GIF for artwork or other images that have mainly solid colors. The difference can be dramatic when you get these formats mixed up. A photographic image saved as a *.GIF file can be twice as large as the same image saved to the *.JPG format. If you’ve saved photographs as *.GIF, try converting them to *.JPG by opening them in your graphics program then clicking on File/Save As. An option at the bottom of the Save As window should appear that is labeled “File type” or “Save as type”. Change it from *.GIF to *.JPG, then click on Save. This will create a smaller file with the same name but a different extension (Ex: picture.gif becomes picture.jpg). For web pages, try to keep each image under 20K in size. Remember, the smaller the file size, the quicker the page will load. If an enlarged image is necessary in order to get the full detail of the photograph, try using the “click here for an enlarged image” option and place the photo by itself on a separate page with a link to it. This gives your users the option of viewing the enlarged image by choice without compromising the size of your page (a.k.a. using “thumbnails”). When sending images to friends and family via e-mail, try to keep the image size to under 50K so that they can download the image in a reasonable amount of time.

Resizing the image and using file compression programs are two common methods to reduce the overall file size. Look for an “image size” or “resizing” option in your graphics programs menus. If you can’t find one, most graphics programs will give you “handles” around an image when you click on it, allowing you to resize the image. (This method can cause degradation in the image, so always look for the menu option first) Be sure to click and drag at the corners of an image in order to maintain your aspect ratio, otherwise you can make your image look like it got “squished”. For the best results, resize and use a file compression utility. Look for a “compression” option in your program’s Help menu to see if you already have what you need. Professional programs such as Adobe’s Photoshop (www.adobe.com) provide an incredible assortment of tools to manipulate images, but are hard to justify for the average home user. If you are a casual user of images, here are links to many free and low cost compression programs:

<a href="http://www.webattack.com/freeware/gmm/fwgcomp.shtml"><font color="#003399">www.webattack.com</font></a>

<a href="http://winfiles.cnet.com/apps/98/graph-compress.html"><font color="#003399">www.winfiles.com</font></a>

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