Hey,

I was cleaning my freight shed and was noticing that some/many of my pictures are considerably larger file sizes than others even though the viewed 700 -800 KB. I know not much about this stuff can a picture file size be reduced without reducing the size of the picture. Say with the resolution or something. I take the pictures with my phone and they are huge. I then shrink them down to around 15% of there original size which is a decent size for viewing on hte net but they are still large files. I am thinking I need to do something else to them to compress them or make them smaller.

Devon, I’ve been using Faststone Capture for years. It’s the greatest program ever of all time for making pictures for the internet and editing the pictures, adjusting color, brightness, captions, borders, special effects, and everything else you could want, including file size. It’s the ultimate what you see is what you get because it doesn’t freaking matter how HUGE the file size is or how terrific the resolution…it only needs to be great looking on your screen, which doesn’t take much.

In fact, after my trial period, I had so worn out the program and was so thankful for the ease of use for images for my websites that I voluntarily paid them $40 instead of the required $20. I sent them a note saying the program was worth ten times the $20.

edit: I’ll go one step further. For obvious reasons, at least marketing-wise, I live and die by electronic images over the internet, and Faststone Capture has been the single greatest time-saver and aggravation-saver and make-an-amateur-look-like-a-pro program I could ever have asked for.

I use a similar editor; Faststone image viewer … it’s a freebie and has fewer options than John’s version, but meets my needs well.

I resize by pixels too; 800 across. The ‘800’ is all I type having previously checked the box to keep the format ratio.

John

PS: I trust the site; downloads.com for my accessories, most of these are rated. Just be careful making sure you click on the correct d/l button, some ads are a tad deceiving.

John2

Thanks guys. Since I have a new computer I have been wanting a new photo editing program as I have been just using paint to resize. I will check it out.

OK, so there are TWO sizes associated with a jpeg…

the first is the “physical” size, measured in pixels… 800 x 600 is the max we allow on the site. Most programs allow you to resize to fewer pixels, and call this the resize operation.

The second on is the “storage” size, measured in bytes. To change this, you can do a couple things. The first is resize to a smaller physical size, and the file size will shrink as you make the picture “smaller”

The other operation is the one you are really asking about, the amount of “compression”, which will appear as resolution or “clarity” or “detail” on the picture. This can be widely varying, and with newer cameras, you can get huge files, and modify the compression (increase the compression) and the picture will still look good, in fact many people cannot tell the difference.

To adjust the compression, you need a more sophisticated graphics program. No idea why very few programs have this, but that’s another story. I use the free program Irfanview, and when you save a jpg file, you will have a “slider” to change the compression, which can reduce the file size. Some programs will even read out the file size in bytes as you play with the “slider” but again most easy to use software does not have this.

Adobe Photoshop will also do this, and Photoshop CS2, Version 9 is now free, the download and the serial number is on the Adobe site.

Greg

Thanks greg

OK, So I am a cheap $^& and I like free so I downloaded the Faststone viewer to give it a try. If I like it I will more than likely buy the $20.00 dollar version. One thing I hate is not having a good photo program. I am also curious about the photoshop free version because I had looked into photoshop when I got the computer and it was a subscription. and I didn’t find anything free. So that has me curious.

Devon, I have an old version of Photoshop Elements on my home computer. Its great for fixing pictures. But for a quick and easy resizing, and some minor tweaks, Irfanview is the program I use. Dave Bodner turned me onto it when my MS Office Photo Editor went TU on me.

I am glad to here there are a few options. So far the Faststone viewer that John recommended looks like it will do I need and more. Most importantly it is knocking down the file size for me.

For what it’s worth, way back when, both Irfanview and faststone were suggested at the same time. It was on an older OS and I tried them both and I migrated to the faststone. I have a different edition on this laptop, it’s a tad less advanced, but still very good for what I do.

John

Devon Sinsley said:

I am glad to here there are a few options. So far the Faststone viewer that John recommended looks like it will do I need and more. Most importantly it is knocking down the file size for me.

Devon…when you go to save your file, picture, image whatever, there is a line called QUALITY = 100, with options at the bottom right. If you select the options you can reduce the size of the file dramatically by going down to quality 85 or whatever and there is very little loss in actual quality that shows up on the screen. Very nifty feature and it’s just exactly what you were originally trying to do in terms of file size.

OK So I have played with the Faststone and the Infraview programs. I can say that since I am not living and dying by my pictures on the net and being cheap the Infraview program is a great free program simply for the compression factor. If the faststone viewer (free program) does this I can’t figure out how. I can reduce the DPI and the actual size but that still was leaving some rather large file sizes. I then took the same picture to the infra view and by simply saving it as Greg says a slider comes up and you can slide it to adjust the “quality.” I took a 700+KB file that my phone is saving at a real high quality (and why the large file size) and reduce its physical size and then compress the file size with the slider down to 20KB or so and the file looks fine for on the net.

So thanks for both of you for both programs. But now I might have to clean out my shed and resize everything (and rename them). I have a bunch of 700KB photos.

Devon, what you do is delete the original file from your freight shed, and then save the smaller file in the same folder, with the same name, in your freight shed. That way it appears in all your previous posts where it was used, and you reclaim space in your shed.

David beat me to it (http://www.largescalecentral.com/externals/tinymce/plugins/emoticons/img/smiley-cry.gif)Devon - If you downsize the photos in the shed, keep the same names and your posts will not suffer broken links.

I’m not a believer in a lot of compression. 25% or so is not noticeable to me, but more than that and the picture suffers, especially if you try and enlarge it to see detail. I post at 1024 wide with 25% compression. LSC automatically down-sizes that to 800 wide, but if anyone wants more detail they can ‘view image’ with their browser to see it full size.

Devon Sinsley said:

OK So I have played with the Faststone and the Infraview programs. I can say that since I am not living and dying by my pictures on the net and being cheap the Infraview program is a great free program simply for the compression factor. If the faststone viewer (free program) does this I can’t figure out how. I can reduce the DPI and the actual size but that still was leaving some rather large file sizes. I then took the same picture to the infra view and by simply saving it as Greg says a slider comes up and you can slide it to adjust the “quality.” I took a 700+KB file that my phone is saving at a real high quality (and why the large file size) and reduce its physical size and then compress the file size with the slider down to 20KB or so and the file looks fine for on the net.

So thanks for both of you for both programs. But now I might have to clean out my shed and resize everything (and rename them). I have a bunch of 700KB photos.

Faststone:

Edit> resize> the top line in the box is By Pixels. That’s what I use. I only had to set this once. I type in 800 and click ok. I save full size pics in my laptop, I edit pics for here, after I edit and resize I save to my LSC folder for easy finding.

PS; At bottom check on preserve perspective.

John

First off since Bob fixed the freight shed to prevent bad file names it automatically fills spaces with the underscore. And since I almost always used a space before I knew better I can’t do as you suggest it will not save it with spaces. It works fine if the file name was a single word or string of letters.

I have learned my lesson and have done as you have suggested on a few. But I am afraid for most it would take uploading the new file name and relinking everything and I ain’t doing that.

Now as for the pixel thing. That only works to a point. My new phone camera was taking pictures that were only 72 dpi and I would size them down to around 600 x 400 pixels depending on how they were cropped or what not. This made for a pretty small picture physically. Easily viewed on a web page full size with room to spare. However the file sizes are 700 to over 800 KB. When you click on them and they open up in a browser they are the same size as on the website. But the file size is just huge.

With infraview I size them the exact same size at 72 dpi and then reduce them to about 70% or a reduction of 30% and the file size is now 50-60 KB. For most stuff this views just as nice as before for web viewing.

I will just delete stuff that is huge and if anyone wants to revisit anything I can gladly repost it. I have the originals still sonits not like they are lost.

I have found that 800x600 (if cropped to only the item of interest) is adequate resolution. But for my web site, I use the highest quality (lowest compression).

My issue is that when I put pictures bigger than that (in pixels) people complained they could not see the whole picture.

Even in this day and age of 1920 x 1080 screens, people with poor vision do NOT run in that screen resolution, but run in a lower resolution to make things bigger. (actually a bit counterproductive since often scaling creates aliasing artifacts)

So that’s where I stick. When I joined MLS the max picture was even smaller, but that was in the day of VGA monitors and Fred Flintstone.

Greg

Greg, yes the old LSOL was 500 pixels wide, then they went to 600 I think. 800 here was a bit of a supersize to me, but it does make for better pictures.