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E-mailing digital photos ... without losing friends

One of the joys of digital photography is being able to share your creations instantly with your friends. But you may not have many friends left if you clog up their e-mail inboxes with pictures that take hours to download.

Not everyone has high-speed Internet

When it comes time to buy a digital camera, many of us get caught up in the megapixel race - that is, we want the most megapixels we can afford. (Megapixels simply represent the amount of detail the camera is able to capture: the more megapixels, the more detail the camera sees.)

Extra megapixels mean we can make bigger prints from our digital files. With a four- or five-megapixel camera, it's possible to make stunning prints at sizes of up to 11x14 and beyond.

While those extra megapixels are great for making prints, they're not so great if you're on the receiving end of an e-mail attachment that contains even one full-size image. If you have only a dial-up Internet connection - and there are still a lot of people who fall into that category - it can take five minutes or more to download just one full-size photo.

If you send five or six images of your child's birthday party, your recipient effectively could be on hold for a half hour or more waiting for all the images to arrive.

How would you feel if you were trapped like that?

Using the resize tool

The first step in e-mailing images is to reduce their size. Odds are, your recipient has no plans to make a poster print of your children. Therefore, they do not need to see all the detail your camera captured.

Most digital picture editing programs, whether you're using Adobe Photoshop, Jasc PaintShop Pro, or the editing program that came with your camera, have a tool for throwing out some of that detail - and significantly reducing the amount of time it takes receive the image.

The resizing tool simply shrinks the overall size of the image. Think of the original image from your camera as a billboard-size poster. What you want to send via e-mail is something more like a 4x6 print.

The tool, which is listed under a variety of names, including "resize" or "image size," is typically found on the "image" pull-down menu. When you select that tool, a box, similar to the one pictured at right, will pop up on your screen.

The top portion of this box shows that an image straight from a six-megapixel camera is more than 3,000 pixels wide. That's three times as wide as the monitors most people use. There's no way anybody can even see all that detail at one time on their screen. They would have to zoom out in order to view the entire image. By reducing the size of the image, we're effectively zooming out for them, and saving them from an excruciatingly long download.

By using the resize tool, I can shrink the image so it's only 500 pixels wide. That's still a fairly good size. Most of the images in the galleries on this site are 500 pixels wide. It gives you just enough detail to appreciate the image, but won't bog down your Internet connection. (It's also not enough detail to make prints, preventing people from stealing your work.)

When you resize an image, make sure that the box for "constraining proportions" or "locking the aspect ratio" is checked. That means when you type a new width for an image, the computer will automatically determine the appropriate height. If you don't check this option, you will have to fill out both the height and width yourself. If you're not good with math, you could end up with an image that appears squished.

Shrinking the image makes a dramatic difference in file size. The original image in this example would take up 18 megabytes of space. The reduced image would take up just 488K. That's a reduction of 97 percent.

Saving more time with JPEG

Cutting the size to 488K is a start, but that would still take well over a minute to download over a dial-up connection.

We can do better.

Pictures are typically sent in the JPEG format, a computer language for storing images. One feature of that format is that it allows you to compress the file even more, not by shrinking the absolute size of the image, but by tossing out some subtle details that you may not notice anyway.

Technically, the JPEG format is what is known as a "lossy" compression method, because once the details are removed, they're gone forever. But that's only a problem if you will want to make prints later. The people who will receive our compressed images are only going to look at them on their screens. We are going to keep the original high-resolution files for ourselves.

You can apply different amounts of JPEG compression to different images. It's a lot like a volume knob. If you set the compression to a very low level, you will notice very little difference between the compressed file and the original. If you turn up the compression, the image will become very blotchy as the program is forced to throw out more and more detail to force the file size smaller.

You adjust the compression settings when you're saving the file. From the "file" pull-down menu, select "save as." Make sure you're saving the image in the JPEG format. The format type is usually listed at the bottom of the box that will pop up.

It's not easy to pick the right compression setting the first time. Different programs display their JPEG compression settings differently. Programs from Adobe generally use a scale of 1-12. The higher the number, the higher the quality of the final image (and the lower the level of compression). If you're using an Adobe program, such as Photoshop or Photoshop Elements, try one of the medium settings, such as 7. You will get to pick the compression level right after you click the save button.

If you use one of the PaintShop programs, you can adjust the compression level by clicking the "option" button in the save box. Their compression value represents the actual amount of compression applied to an image. If you select 1, hardly any compression is applied. You will end up with a very high quality - and large - image. If you select 99, your image will receive so much compression it may be barely recognizable. If your version includes this feature, click on the "run optimizer" button, which will allow you to preview how your image will look at various compression levels. Or you could just set the compression level to something like 25 or 30.

Continuing with our example, for images that are 500 pixels wide, I usually try to use JPEG compression to bring the final file size down to between 25 and 40K. That would take only between five and 10 seconds to download, even on a slow dial-up Internet connection.

Don't lose your original

Whatever compression setting you choose, do not replace your original file.

To minimize the download time, we have significantly reduced the quality of the image. The people who receive your compressed images will not be able to make high-quality prints from them, and if you replace your original file, you will not, either.

Always use the "save as" option to store your compressed files, and pick a different name from your original.

Once you're composing the e-mail to your friends, just make sure that you attach the reduced images we have just created instead of the much-larger originals.

Be a good editor

Even professional photographers tend to be far more enamored with our own images than the people who receive them. Just because you reduce the amount of time it takes to download your images does not give you license to send a few dozen pictures.

Exercise good e-mail etiquette and send no more than three or four of your best images at a time to your friends. That will keep the download time to less than a minute and will give your friends a good idea of what your vacation or event was like. Make sure that each image is strikingly different. Don't send a lot of images that look largely the same.

The key is to leave your audience wanting more, not begging you to stop.