What's the Trick to Posting Larger Photos?

[BlueMountain]

Some people are managing to post mandolin photos that are very sharp and also very large. The biggest I've managed to post are about 140 kb. I start off with a photo that is about 3.5 MB, then make a duplicate and change the size to about 5 inches max. I can make the file a little smaller by saving it as a GIF. But I've found photos on here that are more than 1 MB. I'd like to show mandolins with more detail, but I haven't figured out the trick. Any suggestions?

[sunburst]

Some people are using an independent server rather than using the available space here on the cafe. I don't know how they do that, but I'm probably not the only backwoods, dialup, member that seldom sees those big photos, either because I don't want to wait, or they won't load at all.

With photoshop, something you may or may not have, I can make pretty darned big photos have a small enough file size to post.

Cool inlay on the mando, by the way!

[Bill Snyder]

John is right. Instead of clicking on the ADD REPLY button and posting a photo from their own computer they link to a photo hosting site. Just go to the bottom of the page and enter your text then click the Image button and enter the url for the photo you want to post.
This is why people sometimes post photos that do not show up. The site they linked to is down, the photo is no longer there, the link is broken, etc.

[Greenmando]

You can host pics at different places, like Photobucket.com (http://photobucket.com/) . There used to be photoisland. I think Comcast will host pics for me. I think even hotmail will host pics.

Once you upload your pics to the host, you get a http:// address from them. Enter the address in the "Image" button

[Larry S Sherman]

My Internet Service Provider gives me some free space for a website, and I use it to hold pictures. Then when I post a pic here I can just use a link to the pictures and not worry about the size.

Larry

[Bill Snyder]

The only thing about linking to pictures is when the website that is linked to changes. Some of the older threads have dead links so the pictures no longer show up. http://www.mandolincafe.net/iB_html/non-cgi/emoticons/sad.gif

[BlueMountain]

Ah ha! I've discovered the trick to posting photos that are 8 inches across but only 25-50 K in size. Unfortunately, if you don't have PhotoShop, I can't help you. But if you have photoshop, print this out. I'll put an example of these large photos with small files below (it's 36 K). Read on:

Large Photos / Small Files, Using Photoshop
1. Open Photoshop, then open the photo you want to share. (My photos start out as about 3.5 Megabytes, which is about 36x45 inches at 72 pixels per inch.)

2. Go to FILE, then drag down to SAVE FOR WEB.

3. You may be given a choice of 1, 2, or 4 sampled photos on your desktop. Choose 4 and click on APPLY or something like that. In a few seconds you’ll see the four samples.

4. At the right is a dialog box with some things you can set. Set it to JPEG and to LOW.

5. Below that is another box. Click on IMAGE SIZE. In a few seconds the Image Size box appears. For this photo, the box tells me that the original width of the photo is 2714 pixels, and the original height is 1890 pixels (I’ve cropped this photo already).

6. Where it says NEW SIZE, I’ll change the LARGEST dimension to 800 pixels. Then I’ll click on APPLY. It takes my computer about 15 seconds to digest this.

7. I now have four photos on my screen, and below each is the size. The original here is 1.27 Megabytes. Then there are three JPEGs ready for the web, at different qualities. The highest quality one takes only 45 Kilobytes! The lowest quality one takes 33 K.

8. I click on SAVE, then I get a box that asks where to save it.

9. Then I’m back to the original photo. I click to close it, and when I get a dialog box asking if I want to save it, I click on NO.

So I now have an adequately sharp photo as big as I want it to be on MandolinCafe, but it takes up much less room than the maximum here. Before I was posting photos about 3.5 inches across at 72 ppi, and they were taking 125 K. Now I’m posting an 8 inch photo, and it’s taking only 45K. Hooray!

Oh, by the way, I’m using PhotoShop CS for Mac, about two years old, but I learned to do this from an instruction book based on version 7, which is about three years old. It should be pretty much the same for PCs.

[glauber]

I found that Image Shack (http://www.imageshack.us) is a good service, very easy to use. They do the resizing if you want, but i prefer to post full size and use their clickable thumbnails. This way it doesn't take long to load and if the reader is interested, she or he can click to see the full picture (actually, Imageshack resizes it so it fits the browser window - it takes one more click to see the larger-than-browser original).

http://img447.imageshack.us/img447/6813/015_12.th.jpg (http://img447.imageshack.us/my.php?image=015_12.jpg)

Unfortunately, they're beginning to put ads (to be expected - nothing is for free), but i don't think they're doing anything evil yet.

[glauber]

Grandmainger's tutorial (http://www.grandmainger.com/picpost/) is very good; it covers all the possibilities.

[Tom C]

BlueMountain,
That works to a certain point but you are losing quality. You can see the stepping rather tthan nice smooth lines. -Just a trade off thing.

[BlueMountain]

Tom: You're right. I'm losing a lot of quality. However, I could do the same thing but at much higher quality and still end up with an 8 inch photo at under 100 K. Most of these are 25-40 K. Compare that to my usual of about 500 K for an 8 inch photo at 72 ppi. Maybe I should go with a larger file and higher quality. I'll work on it. Still, the larger photos are nice.

[BlueMountain]

Okay, here are some modifications to the technique. When doing the above, set the JPEG quality at MEDIUM and choose 30 quality. Starting with a 3.5 MB photo, changed to 800 pixels per inch at the longest dimension, this will yield a file of about 60 K. This is twice as big a file as one gets using the technique described above, but about half the size of the maximum size for this site. Tom, I think the quality is a lot higher here, not too far from the original at this size. What do you think? Better? (photo of my 93 Summit A)

[sunburst]

I use Photoshop 7.0.
I've found that I get much better pics with my camera "set on kill" (highest resolution) rather than reducing the resolution at the camera. That gives me huge files when I download them to the computer, so I have to shrink them in almost all cases.

For the web;
First, I do all my croping, color ballancing, whatever "dark room" work I need, then resize.

I go to image - image size - resolution, and go ahead and set that at 72 ppi, since that's the resolution of most computer monitors. That makes the image much smaller. Then, I simply use the zoom tool until the size looks like I want it on the screen. The size is displayed in the lower left corner as a percent, and when it's as big as I want, I go back to image - image size and where you can choose inches, mm, whatever, I choose percent, type in the size that was displayed in the lower left corner, and click enter.
Then I can go to file - save for web, and the pic will be the size it was displayed on my monitor. (I don't go beyond 100% because that ruins the picture.)

That may be a crude way of doing it, but I don't have to know the size in pixels, or do any math. Just look at the size and go from there.

I've found that, at least with my browser, a picture posted too big for the monitor will get shrunken by the browser, and when that happens, the edges get those little steps in them. If I post the picture a little smaller so that the browser doesn't resize it, the edges are smooth.

[sunburst]

The photo of the Summit posted above has jagged edges when I view it in my browser, so I downloaded it, and found that my browser was displaying it at 87% size. I resized it to 87%, and I'm re-posting it to see if the edges smooth up when I look at it, I expect it to post at the same size.

[edit] It worked. The edges are smooth, and the image is displayed the same size.
That might just be this browser, (firefox) I don't know.
Actually, thinking about it, I believe I set the browser up to resize large images so I don't have to scroll back and forth.

[levin4now]

I've been using a free product called IRFANVIEW (http://www.irfanview.com) to do a lot of BATCH resizing/resampling. #Works pretty well.