July 27, 2005 - Managing Photos from High-Res Digital Cameras
I'm sure just about anybody who uses email has received photos from a friend or family member and has had to wait for large email attachments to download (even with broadband). Then when opening the photos they span across your screen or have to be resized to fit. The reason for this, which we are seeing more and more of, is due to the high-res images that are produced with digital cameras.

To give you a better understanding, the typical display on a monitor is either 800x600 or 1028x768 pixels (width x height). A 1.3 megapixel camera would have image sizes of 1280 x 960, a 2.2 megapixel camera would be 1901 x 1212 and a 3.1 megapixel camera would be 2160 x 1440. I'm sure you can imagine how large of an image a brand new 7 megapixel camera would take. Although these images are suitable for photo printing they are not suitable for email or websites. The actual file sizes are directly proportional to the image resolution, which can be up to 5+ megabytes on high-res cameras.

To get around this most people use a program like Adobe Photoshop to resample the images prior to using. But not everybody has access to these programs or knows how to use them. For the average user, I recommend a program called Easy Thumbnails by Fookes Software. With this program you can select multiple files and resample them in one pass - then you are ready to send them to your friends or family. A resolution of 800x600 is more than ideal for sending through email.