Preparing Images to Attach to Email
All too many times budding photographers send full-sized 1-, 2-, or even 3-megapixel pictures as email attachments that take forever to download and are too large to view comfortably on the computer monitor.
Indeed, you should shoot at your camera's highest resolution, but remember not to send those full-sized images to others. All parties concerned will be much happier if you create a much smaller “email version” of your pictures and send those along.
Use your image editor to resize a copy for easier handling. To do so, use the "Save As" command in your image editor. The largest size you should send as an email attachment is 640 x 480 pixels, and 320 x 240 pixels will usually do the job.
If you're lucky enough to have Photoshop (or Photoshop Elements) as your image editor, then use the "Image Size" function to resize the picture. (Other image editors have similar functions too!) When you first open the dialogue box, you'll see the current width and height of the picture. In the settings in the illustration above, those dimensions are 2272 pixels wide by 1704 pixels tall. This shot was taken at full resolution with a 4-megapixel camera. If you sent this picture as is, the file size would be well over 1 megabyte even after compression, and a full 11 megabytes when opened. That’s not the kind of attachment you want to send to friends and family.
But after using image size to reduce the pixel dimensions to 320 x 240, the compressed file size shrank to under 100 kb -- that’s less than 1/10th the size of the original image!
Make sure you have both the "Constrain Proportions" and "Resample Image" boxes checked when preparing image copies for email. With the “Constrain Proportions” box checked, Photoshop will automatically change the height dimension for you.
If you have a choice, the best image format to use for email attachments is JPEG (.jpg). You will usually be asked (by your computer) when saving in this format which level of compression you want to use. Generally speaking, medium or high gives you the quality you need.
Remember to keep your original image safe and sound so you can use it later for printing and large display. To help eliminate confusion when dealing with these different sizes, you might want to save two copies, calling one vacation one hires.jpg and the more compact version vacation one lores.jpg.
By sending friends and family smaller, more manageable pictures, you’ll hear more about how beautiful you’re your shots are and less about how long the darn thing took to download.