# My digital photos take up too much space!



## 3kids4me (Feb 19, 2006)

I recently got a digital camera (Canon S2) and I am using the Dell Photo Imaging software to import them into the computer.  However, each picture takes up at 1.5 MB of space, which means I can never send more than one or possibly two to someone at a time because the file gets too big.

Am I doing something wrong?  Is there other software I should use, or a way to make the images use less memory?

Thanks for any help!

Sharon


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## mikey0531 (Feb 19, 2006)

Hi Sharon -- I'm no expert at these things but have you tried to change the resolution on your pictures?  If you want the pics to take up less space, perhaps you could lower the resolution of the pics.  And, I also think there is software available to change the size of the pictures.  We can make them smaller on our computer with Microsoft Office Picture Manager.  There's an option to compress but I really don't know much about it.  If you have a lot of pictures, you could purchase an external hard drive.  Prices have really come down on them.  My father has thousands of pictures stored on his external hard drive.  This is all he uses it for.  Debi


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## Fern Modena (Feb 19, 2006)

Sharon,
Its always best to shoot at the highest resolution possible, for the clearest picture (especially if you might want to print a large picture like 8 by 10 later).  If you want to downsize only for email, our own Ed Bott has a description on how to do this easily.  You can find it here: *http://urlci.com/ad0294

*If you want to resize pics to save them, do a Google for XP Powertoys Image Resizer, which is very easy to use.


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## 3kids4me (Feb 19, 2006)

Thanks guys.

Fern,

I think that option has worked for me...except that the e-mail account attached to my Dell software is one that we no longer use.  Now I just have to figure out how to change the account designation!!

Sharon


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## Mimi (Jul 20, 2008)

Jumping Rock, Waimea Bay - Oahu






Well, I tried...


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## T_R_Oglodyte (Jul 20, 2008)

Mimi said:


> Jumping Rock, Waimea Bay - Oahu
> 
> http://i349.photobucket.com/albums/q373/MimiUSA/Oahu%20-%20June%202008/DSCN5936.jpg[IMG]
> 
> ...


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## T_R_Oglodyte (Jul 20, 2008)

3kids4me said:


> I recently got a digital camera (Canon S2) and I am using the Dell Photo Imaging software to import them into the computer.  However, each picture takes up at 1.5 MB of space, which means I can never send more than one or possibly two to someone at a time because the file gets too big.
> 
> Am I doing something wrong?  Is there other software I should use, or a way to make the images use less memory?
> 
> ...



Sharon - most of my images run about 5 MB. If you want good quality in your photos, you shouldn't go any less than where you are now.

You will soon find that you need a good large capacity disk on which to store them.  And be sure to back them up.


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## Kal (Jul 20, 2008)

Steve is correct.  Set the camera to take the very best quality image and the very largest size.  From there you can do all kinds of things with the image, but the image you download from the camera is very limited in what you can do with it AS IS.

If you send the image by email or post it on the internet, it first needs to be modified.  That modification will usually change the "compression" (i.e. quality) and/or image size.  There is a huge selection of software to accomplish this task so do some research to find the software that works best for you.  However, be careful as you must always keep the original then do your modifications on a copy of the original.  That way you can always start over.


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## TUGBrian (Jul 20, 2008)

you can even use mspaint to resize an image

i usually shrink them down to 25% or so to make them "internet friendly" if im going to share them.


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## Icarus (Jul 20, 2008)

3kids4me said:


> Am I doing something wrong?  Is there other software I should use, or a way to make the images use less memory?



Instead of sending them in email, post them to flickr or picasa (google) for free. (or any other free photo web site, that you want to use.)

Then send your friends links to your photos online.

For flickr, use your yahoo ID to setup your account there. For picasa, you need a google or gmail account (register for free), and download the picasa application and after selecting the pictures you want to publish, click on the "web album" button in the picasa application. It will also let you resize, fix red eye, etc. picasa has options when you publish pictures to the web about changing the file size. The default is reasonable, but there are three choices. One is full size, one is small, and one is optimized, which I think is the default, so it's the middle one in terms of file size/quality, and seems to be very reasonable.

At least with picasa you can mark your web albums as public or private. I don't think private prevents other people from seeing them, but they won't be listed in your public directory, so they have to know the URL (which you send them) in order to view private albums. (I haven't tried "private", so there might be additional options that I don't know about.)

If you just want to resize the photos to reduce their file size, any imaging application will let you do that. irfanview is a decent free one.

-David

I just realized that the OP was from February.


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## Fern Modena (Jul 20, 2008)

David's idea is a good one if you have more than a picture or two to send.  My new car was having an intermittent problem with the radio screen.  I took some pictures of it at its worst and posted them to a folder on Picture trail (but any of the photo services would have worked).  Then my salesperson was able to persuade the service manager to order a new part for me without my making an extra trip down there to show it to him (and he might not have seen it since it was intermittent).  It worked, and I had the new radio within two days, with expedited repair service.

I also made a folder for my insurance guy when we had the Flood of 2004 (water line to fridge broke and soaked two rooms)

Fern


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## T_R_Oglodyte (Jul 20, 2008)

Kal said:


> … However, be careful as you must always keep the original then do your modifications on a copy of the original.  That way you can always start over.



Haven't we had this discussion previously???  

Here's what I try to do consistently.  I download pictures from my camera to my photo store on an external hard drive.  I then discard any obviously unusable or unwanted photos. If there's any possibility I might want the photo at some time, I keep it. A

The remaining photos now go to the photo store on the hard drive of my computer.  I file them by year and photo session (e.g., I have a 2008 folder, and within that 2008 folder are subfolders for each trip or activity I've undertaken when I took photos.  When I transfer photos to my hard drive, I put them in a folder titled "unedited" within the folder for each activity.  

When I'm ready to work on photos, I go through that "unedited" folder and select the photos I want to work on or keep.  After I finish working on a photo it gets stored in a new folder titled "finished".  I save most photos I work in both jpeg and PaintShop format - most of my editing is nondestructive editing using layers and masks, and that information is retained in the PSP format.  Any photos that I want to save without editing get transferred into the "finished" folder as well. 

When I'm done working on photos from a given activity, I go back to my photo store and delete all of the photos downloaded from my camera for that activity, and replace them with the contents of the "finished" from my hard drive.  I do routine backups of my entire home network, and the photo store is included in that routine backup. The disk on which that backup is done is stored in our safe deposit box.  One of our other computers has a second hard drive for general storage; I often do another backup there.

I leave the contents of the session on my hard drive as long as convenient.  Generally if I start running out of room on my hard drive those old photo sessions are prime candidates for deletion to free up room.

This sounds complicated, but it really isn't. Once you go though it a couple of times it becomes pretty easy.  

But if you don't institute a file management system for your digital photos, pretty soon you lose control of things. You won't know what photos you have stored where, which are backups and which are primary, and which are backed up and which aren't.


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## 3kids4me (Jul 20, 2008)

Icarus said:


> I just realized that the OP was from February.



Actually, February *2006*.  Bizarre.


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## stonebroke (Jul 20, 2008)

*Using Picassa to resize for email*

One of the really nice features I like in Picassa is that you can email pictures.  Under tools then options then email you can choose to resize your email photos and what size.  Click on the photo in picassa, click email at the bottom of the screen,  it asks if you want to use gmail or your default email account which most of us is some form of outlook.  You can then mark other photos and mail several or just the one.

I started using smugmug to store my photos.  I also back them up to and external hard drive before deleting them.


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## Kal (Jul 20, 2008)

3kids4me said:


> Actually, February *2006*. Bizarre.


 
It gets late early out there.


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## Keitht (Jul 21, 2008)

There are many ways to reduce the size of an image if all you plan to do with it is send to people via the internet.  The advice given about having the original at the highest possible resolution is sound and you should really never modify that original.  Work on a copy so that if and when things go wrong, as they surely will, you have something to go back to.
An image reduced to about 200kb will still have good detail contained in it for display on a monitor or sending to friends.


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## Mimi (Jul 21, 2008)

Thanks, Steve...now I've got it!!!



T_R_Oglodyte said:


> Mimi - the only problem is that the last tag on the right needs to be "[/IMG]" (the slash "closes" the tag).


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