Web Sized Images | Email Sized Images
(This is some pretty dated information)

Naturally, you want your newly digitized images to be a high quality so that you can print them out but you may, very likely, want your images to be of a size that you could send in an email or even use to make your own website.

 

Photos posted on the Internet or sent via email do not need nearly as many pixels as are needed when printing. The same can be said about images that will be viewed in a slide show or in a PowerPoint presentation. File size is also important because many people still use a dial-up modem to connect to the Internet and it will take a lot longer for them to open up web pages or email messages that contains large image files. The higher the resolution of the image, in relationship to its dimensions will determine the file size of the image. Larger file sizes take longer to send, receive and load.

 

One of our high resolution images may have a file size anywhere from 1500kb to over 3000kb depending on the color content, brightness and various other factors. Say you have a small image that is 538kb in size. If you put that one image into a web page and a person with a 28.8 dial-up modem wanted to load that image, it would take them 286 seconds or 4 minutes and 46 seconds. That is unreasonable by anyone's standards.  It would even take 64 seconds if you have an ISDN connection. Since people do not need the high resolution just to view images on the computer, the file size

 

For Comparison Purposes Only:
Original Size of an Image viewed in the "Before" display below.

Before Web Sizing Viewed on Monitor
This is how a medium sized image will display on a 19" monitor set to a resolution of

 

After Web Sizing Viewed on Monitor
This is how our Web Sized image will display on a 19" monitor set to a resolution of
1280x960 pixels

 

We hope you can see the need for web sizing your images. The "Before" picture above shows that a person will not be able to see the full image on a large computer monitor without scrolling. Not the best way to view your images. Once your image is web sized it is much easier to display and it takes a much shorter time for your browser to display the images. You need the full sized image for printing but for any display you are only going to need web sized images.

Below you can see Before and After examples of the same image displayed in email.
These are full sized screen shots of the email message.

 If you send someone a full sized image, they are not going to be able to easily view it. It is going to take them forever to download their email and they may even think that something is wrong with their email program because it is taking so long to download their mail. Do your friend or relative a favor and do not send a full sized, high resolution image by email. They can always request a full sized version of the image later on and you will have the full sized image, also, on your disk.