Upload Photos to the Web
Here’s a message specifically for the people using my family photo album, but it can also be useful for anyone wanting to upload photos to the web.
Most digital cameras today take photos at 5-10 Megapixels. This high resolution can result in large files ranging from 800KB - 5,000KB this is a large file to upload. The typical method I’ve seen people try to upload photos is:
- Take the photo
- Transfer to the computer
- Upload to a website
- ait… wait… wait…
Now imagine if you wanted to upload 10 photos, or 100 photos. You could be waiting for an hour for everything to upload. Or what usually happens is the file is too big and you get an error message.
So… what can you do?
Reduce the size of the picture.
My 5 Megapixel camera takes pictures with a dimension of 2592 x 1944 pixels. This is a decent resolution for printing a nice looking 8″x10″ photo but contains way too much information for displaying on my screen. Most screens only display 1024 x 768 pixels.
We better figure out what the heck a pixel is before we continue.
A pixel is an individual dot in an image. Digital images are made of an exact number of horizontal dots and vertical dots. Your computer screen has an exact number of horizontal and vertical dots. A single pixel is too small to easily show, so each gridline box contains 10 pixels x 10 pixels. The following graphic shows an example of what the yellow shaded area would look like if we zoomed in on it. At this point you can see the individual pixels that make up the image.
Remember you can calculate the area of a box by multiplying its height by width. The examples above are 200 high by 200 wide, 200 x 200 = 40,000. A 200×200 box contains 40,000 pixels! That’s a lot of individual pixels in a small area. Now imagine the total number of pixels in your 2592 x 1944 pixel photo. It contains 5,038,848 pixels! By the way, just in case you missed it, you now know why it is called a five megapixel camera. And a ten megapixel camera will take a photo that contains approximately 10,000,000 pixels.
The following picture is an example of the amount of information that is stored in a picture taken with a digital camera and the amount of this that can be displayed on the screen. When you display the picture on your computer your computer resizes the photo, or zooms out so that you can see the whole photo.
Note: This picture is at 1/10 scale, otherwise it most likely would not have fit on your screen right now.
When uploading photos to a website you can dramatically reduce the size of the file by creating a copy of the photo and resizing it to something more reasonable for displaying on the screen. Some common sizes for photos to upload are:
- 1024×768
- 800×600
- 640×480
You have two options to resize a large photo down to a smaller image:
- Crop - this results in an image that is a selected portion of the larger photo. It’s like taking a pair of scissors to your photo and cutting out a smaller piece.
- Scale/Resize - this results in an image that looks similar to your original but is a smaller resolution.
Personally I do a bit of both. I crop my images because I usually want to cut out some of the edge of the photo and then I resize my photos down to 800×600.
OK OK, enough theory, and enough pictures of pictures… I’m sure you want to see how you can apply this theory to your own photos. There are lots of applications out there that can help you. There probably is an application that came with your camera that will help. There are lots of other applications you can purchase, e.g. Adobe Photoshop or Adobe Lightbox.
My favourite is actually a free tool offered by Google that organizes and allows you to compress your images. A few years back, a company offered a commercial product called Picassa. It offered a nice feature of being able to organize and search through a large collection of photos on your computer. Google liked the idea. They liked it soo much they bought the company. Now they offer the software free of charge!
You can download Picassa as a stand alone application or you can download it as part of a “Google Pack”. A Google Pack includes other free software offered by Google that you will most likely find very useful. I have this installed on all my computers.
Picassa will allow you to organize as well as crop, resize, straighten, and adjust your images. There are a lot of great features in an easy to use interface. Trust me, just try it out for a few days and I’m sure you’ll love it as much as I do.
Click on the following link to download:
Take a moment to download and install this application. Then come back and see my next article, Using Picassa to Resize Images.