How to reduce digital photos in size?

When you insert digital photos into any application like PowerPoint or Word without preparing them first you will run into problems. What happens is, even after only inserting a few pics the filesize of the document will be enourmous, clogging up your email account and/or your hard disk pretty quickly.

Just resizing them inside the application only reduces the appearance of the picture - not the picture itself. The data file in the background is still the same size.

Example: You took a digital photo. At 6 megapixel the photo has a resolution of 2816 x 2112 pixels and is about 1,95 MB in size.

You insert this picture into Powerpoint for a homework assignment. As the picture would be very much wider and taller than your screen and thus unmanageble, Powerpoint automatically adjusts the optical resolution (the picture you see) to the pre-set paper or screen presentation format, i.e. US letter format. Even if you adjust the size further down (using the little black "handles" around the selected picture), this - again - only adjusts what you see. The inserted file is still a hefty 1,95 MB.

You add 9 more pictures. Now the powerpoint file size is suddenly 19,5 MB!

Most email providers will never allow this to be sent and/or received.

So, how can you avoid this?

Easy: Reduce the physical resolution of the picture without damaging the original. Accepted resolutions for web use and/or use within documents and emails are:

160 x 120 - small - small enough to leave room for text
320 x 200 - bigger - already covers a quarter of the Powerpoint sheet
640 x 480 - medium - covers almost the entire Powerpoint sheet
800 x 600 - large - significantly bigger than the Powerpoint sheet

Everything after 800 x 600 is too big for this specific purpose.

Have a look at the example screenshot taken from Powerpoint (see below). Notice how large even a 160 x 120 picture is in Powerpoint?
Tip: How can you check if your picture is scaled or full size? Right click in the picture and select "Format Picture", then select the "size" tab. "100%" percent means, the picture is not scaled, but shown at it's original size.

Example: 6 megapixel JPG, 1,95 MB in size is approx. 18 MB uncompressed

Note: We are going to use the free, open source AFELO picture compressor for this example, but feel free to use whichever software you prefer. If you want to download AFELO please click here. It is available for Windows, Mac and Linux and the only prerequisite is a fairly recent Java Runtime. Click here for illustrated installation instructions. (TBD)

Keeping it simple, for homework, we have to insert one (1) digital photo into a powerpoint presentation and write a nice story about where and how we took it.

Now, to make everybodies life easier, we are going to reduce the physical size of those 6 megapixel pictures without reducing the quality too much.

Start AFELO, then click on "Compress & Upload Images"

Next select if you want to convert one or a folder full of photos.

For this example select "One single image"

Next, select the photo you want to reduce in size. This is basically a file menu you know from PC and MAC applications like Word or Powerpoint.

A: You can quick jump to the "My Pictures" folder in "My Documents", to "Desktop" if you placed your pictures on the Windows/Mac Desktop, "My Documents" quickjumps to the "My Documents" folder or "Another Directory" which will bring up the usual Windows/Mac file selection dialog box.

B: If you selected any folder containing pictures they will show up here. Seletect one or more and click on "Forward".

C: This icon allows you to move UP in the tree structure. The other icons that might show up to it's right are the folders/directories contained in the folder you selected under point A.

Next, after clicking on "Forward", leave the setting drop down box on "optimize for the web" and selct one of the offered resolutions. You might have to experiment a bit until you find the one right for the job.

As a guideline: 800 x 600 is very big! Check with the sample picture below yhis picture how big even 160 x 120 is when used in Powerpoint running at 1024 x 768, the usual resolution of a 15" - 17" LCD.

Next step. AFLEO lets you modify the selected picture(s) in this step. You can either turn the image you click on on the far left, or, if you click on the icon with the red rectangle, set the brightness, contrast, hue and saturation of the selected picture. Go ahead, try it, if you are dissatisfied, just click on the green swirly-arrow button, this will reset it to the pictures original state. When you are satisfied, click on "Forward".

Now for the most important part. Where do you want to put the resized pictures? AFELO can put them on your Desktop. It will create a new folder, labeled with "AFELO_IMG_YEARMMDD_TIME". Example: "AFELO_IMG_20090407_1515" This was saved on 7th April 2009, at 3:15pm. Or you can save it to a folder you specify.

Now let's compare what the benefit of this whole procedure is. The original 6 megapixel picture was close to 2 megabytes, that is roughly 2.000.000 bytes.