Re-sizing Photos

[Geoff & Jude]

Those of us who do not have broadband and are limited to dial-up connections wait long periods for photos to upload when viewing posts that include high resolution photos.

To make it quicker, why not resize your high resolution photos before uploading your them to photobucket.

Here's a link to Light Image Resizer, (previously called VSO Image Resizer), it's free and very good.

It's a simple download and reduces the upload time by about 90%.

Geoff 'n Jude

[Don Ricardo]

Hi Geoff & Jude and Rolly,

That's a good tip Geoff & Jude, and something that people on broadband like me probably don't realise. Are you able to tell me what size photo works best for you?

Rolly, you are correct, Photobucket does allow you to re-size photos in terms of physical size (ie width x height). However, I think Geoff & Jude are talking about size in terms of the resolution of the photos in DPI (dots per inch). It is possible to have a photo with the same size in terms of width and height but greater or lesser resolution or DPI (eg 300 DPI vs 600 DPI). In terms of visibility on the forum, however, we don't really need photos to be very high DPI, and photos with a lower DPI take less time to dowload on dial up internet connection.

Geoff & Jude - can you confirm that I have picked up the issue you were writing about?

By the way, as requested, I have pinned this thread just below Jim's instructions in the Members' Photo Album section.

Don Ricardo

[Geoff & Jude]

hi don and chris

you're right don.

vso resizes by keeping the physical dimension and reducing the dpi. (you can choose to alter the original or save as a reduced copy).

i did some checks with p/b and it reduces the physical dimension but only reduces the dpi marginally, no real advantage for dial-up customers.

the photo size doesn't worry us, we're on broadband but vso has a default which reduced our test photos from about 3Mb down to about 120kb. (saved about 2.5Gb of space on the hard drive for what we have stored).

geoff 'n jude

[Roehm3108]

I made this suggestion some time before - probably about 2-3 years ago, but it sems to have gone by the wayside. I can't get broadband here and am limited to dialup and find it very frustrating to download what would be great viewing.

I have found that if I want to post a pic to someone, and click the pic to "send as email", it asks if I want to reduce the pic, which it will do to about 50kb. This can then be saved to that size on p/bucket and makes downloading to p/bucket shorter as well.

Ray

[Daggsey]

Hi Geoff, Jude and Di,

Have downloaded the resizer programme you recommended and it certainly works. I have transferred all my photos to a 120GB external hard drive, so I still have the originals (and away from the computer, which means it is a back-up). I am now in the process of "dropping and dragging" those originals back onto my D drive, resizing them and then deleting the copied originals. My total hard-drive space on the laptop was 50GB, divided between the C drive and the D drive.......the difference in available space is phenominal (I was down to 2GB remaining out of 27GB on the D drive where I had my photos stored, before Geoff/Jude alerted me to the VSO programme)

With wireless broadband, opening up a thread with many photos can be painfully slow if the signal strength is weak. I have always been conscious that the number of photos I have been putting on "Lady Madonna's Travels" may have been slow to open on some peoples computers, depending on the speed of their internet link. Certainly as particular threads get bigger with many photos posted, it can be painfully slow opening them as the photos are downloaded (you can see the number of photos ("items remaining") and the speed of download in the bottom left corner as a thread is opening)

It will be interesting to see if my future photos will download quicker for those that are on dial-up.

Following are some photos from Coledale 2008 which I have re-sized.......they were certainly quicker to upload into photobucket.....I don't think the quality has been affected.......it will be interesting to see how much quicker it will be for the likes of 1954Homemade to open this thread..................









Pity I hadn't come across this programme before.........I've still got 300 folders out of 370 to re-size (that's folders, not photos!!)

Daggsey

[Geoff & Jude]

hi daggsey

you mentioned that you're "now in the process of "dropping and dragging" those originals back onto my D drive, resizing them and then deleting the copied originals."

you may already have seen this, but in the 'action' dropdown on the opening window you have the option to replace the original, so you don't have to go to the trouble of deleting the original.

geoff 'n jude

[Franklin1]

And then there's the lazy way of resizing your photos in Photobucket...

Step 1: Log into your Photobucket account "home page" and click on the [Upload] button at the top of the screen...





Step 2: Wait for the page to reload and then click on the gear wheel on the right hand side...





Step 3: A pop up box will appear on the screen. Change the dot to the 800 x 600 pixel setting, and click the [Save] button...




All photos uploaded from this point on will be resized to 800 x 600 if they are LARGER than that size when you upload them. If they are already LESS than 800 x 600 pixels, they will stay the same lower size. All photos already in your albums that are LARGER than 800 x 600 pixels will stay the larger size. Photo sizes will only change from the moment when you [Save] this change.

The three photos I've posted above are 800 pixels wide by 450 pixels high, so an 800 x 600 photo will be the same width as mine but a bit higher.

If you think 800 x 600 is too large, put the dot in the 640 x 480 pixel option. That's approximately the size I use when posting in my Newcastle thread. Depends which size you prefer.

Make sense??

cheers,
Al.