Decrease Photo Size for Attaching to E-mail (2003/??)

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A friend of mine sends a 4-page Christmas card each year that contains 8 photos. He is currently having this card printed professionally. He would prefer to send it as an attachment in Outlook.

Many of his recipients are unable to receive an attachment of its current size. Is there ANY way he can get the photos or document down to a reasonable size that can be opened by Hotmail, dial-up, and any other e-mail service?

Diane

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How large are the photos? When sending in an email, I suspect they could be made quite small, maybe 640×480? If so, using medium JPEG compression, they should be pretty lightweight. Something like MS Photo Editor (in Office 2000) can save to a different size with an adjustable level of compression, so I suspect the new thing in Office 2003 can, too. Or download Irfanview.

If the goal is to send the same print-quality photos by e-mail that previously were distributed as prints, that’s not such a good use of bandwidth. Perhaps it would be better to host it on a web site and circulate a link.

Added: Oh, it’s a Word document. Word has some kind of photo compression feature for photos, but I’ve never tried it. If that doesn’t help, reimporting smaller images probably will. Note that Word will scale the photos to fit the margins, and that can make them appear fuzzy when viewed on screen. It’s a trade-off: clearer on screen vs. higher quality for printing. PDF has the same compromise.

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I find the word compression works very well for the function described and would recommend it as by far the easiest method for word users who don’t want to be bothered by geeky things.

Insert the picture(s) into your word document and drag it to the size you want, then, on the picture toolbar select ‘compress pictures’
Personally I find 200dpi is an excellent compromise for mere mortals.

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I don’t have 2003, but I found the feature in 2002. A test document I created with 8 photos is 700Mb. I compressed “all” pictures in the document at 200 dpi, and then saved it as a new document. The file size did not change. Should the file size have changed?

Diane

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The best method is to make the images smaller before inserting within Word. I use the “Image resizer” from the MS Power Toys. I resize the images to the size I want and this requires NO clipping or cropping in Word. The word file will be much smaller. I also will at times change the jpg to gif, which will make the file size smaller yet.

DaveA I am so far behind, I think I am First
Genealogy....confusing the dead and annoying the living

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I am going to send him a link to this thread so he can see all of your suggestions. The Image Resizer that you and John have suggested may make enough of a difference to make the process feasible. Saving it as a .gif file may also help. I may have to try the Image Resizer for a project of my own.

Thanks for your help!

Diane

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Be aware that the image resizer ONLY works with Windows XP.

DaveA I am so far behind, I think I am First
Genealogy....confusing the dead and annoying the living

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I did not realize that. Thanks for making me aware.

Diane

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If you’re after something that will work on any version of Windows, I’d recommend IrfanView. It’s very adept at batch operations, like Batch-Resizing Images and is a very popular ware program for image manipulation generally.

Alan

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Just as a footnote, JPEG is the best compression method for photographs, and PNG is best for screen shots. GIF works well when there are very few colors (like lounge emoticons), and supports transparent backgrounds, but it makes ugly (and large) photo files.

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Thanks for this information. I, personally, don’t work with graphics much and do a lot of trial-and-error to get my results.

The photos were originally in .JPEG from a digital camera and may have been about as small as I could get them. Perhaps IrfanView can help from this point. It’s nice to see it has been recommended a couple of times here. I will certainly take a look at it.

Diane

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Another possibility is using the Pegasus Imaging Online JPEG Compression Wizard. I haven’t used it for a long while, but from memory it was a good service.

Alan

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That might mean that the photos already were saved at 200 dpi or less, so Word didn’t do anything to them.

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700MB – really MEGA bytes and not 700KB?

Eight pictures, in word, taking 700KB would be about what I’d expect, depending on size of picture.
If all eight fitted on one page, then that would be a different story and I’d expect less – say 150KB or so

Andrew

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700 could be very true, with all of these new cameras making the hugh files. remember that bigger is better. Even the use of a scanner, the images are in the 100 of megs in size.

Word does not reduce the size of the inserted photo, it just reduces the VIEWING size (Zoom) of the image. This is why you can resize the viewing size by dragging the sides and corners.

DaveA I am so far behind, I think I am First
Genealogy....confusing the dead and annoying the living

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I think most digital camera JPEG files would be smaller than 5MB each; Word only needs a small OLE wrapper to embed JPEG images, so the file should not exceed 50MB with 8 such images.

There is no such thing as an ideal size and resolution for all purposes. If I were designing a card in Word and wanted 300dpi images that fit within a 6″ margin, I would use the calculator and end up with the dimensions 1800×1350, or about 2.5 megapixels. Eight of those could add up to 4MB using JPEG compression. For on-screen viewing, images more like 640×480 would be sufficient, and most inkjet printers can do a nice job with 180dpi images.

But this is all beside the point… the original user first needs to define what he wants. Perhaps a good compromise would be to e-mail a teaser card with small images (e.g., QVGA — 320×240), and link to a web site hosting the high resolution versions?

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Diane,
We need to get back to the real issue.

Can you find out if the images are from a digital camera or were scanned from hard copies?

What are the sizes and type of images that are being used?

If scanned what resolution they were scanned at?

DaveA I am so far behind, I think I am First
Genealogy....confusing the dead and annoying the living

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The images are from a digital camera. I think he uses the same as mine, Olympia Camedia. In looking at 20 or so of my own photos, the sizes range from 389-440KB. The sample I’ve been using was created from eight of my photos.

I have not heard from him since sending him a link to this site. He travels a lot, and it is possible he is out of town. If I’ve stated anything incorrectly, I’m sure he will either reply here or to me directly (and I will pass along his comments).

I’ll also look at the Pegasus Imaging Wizard.

Oh, Andrew, the document size is 700 KB, not MB as I stated.

Diane

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700KB is NOT large for that many images in a Word file. It could be made smaller by using any of the tricks listed above.

DaveA I am so far behind, I think I am First
Genealogy....confusing the dead and annoying the living

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I agree. It just happens to be too big for him to send as an attachment. He could always send it as eight separate messages.

Diane

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I have made use of the Microsoft PowerToy called Image Resizer (work your way down the right-hand column). When installed, it becomes part of the right-click menu in Windows Explorer (“Resize Pictures”) from which you can choose one of four standard sizes, or can set up your own custom size via an Advanced button. You can do this with one or a whole host of pictures! Very straightforward, and gives no problems.

John

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