How to decrease file size on photos?

do you have photoshop? Or what version of iPhoto do you have?

It would help to know if you have a Mac or a PC. There are a ton of free utilities that will do that automatically.

If your on a PC, Picassa is one of the best FREE downloadable I have ever used!

http://picasa.google.com/features/index.html

It can not only help you resize but crop, adjust color and manage them.

I hope this helps.

Bri_L

When saving them in photoshop, make sure you save as a .jpg at 5, or lower, file size.

Also – in photoshop – go into the image size menu, and make sure the “pixels per inch” is “72”, I believe that’s the standard web size.

A great free online photo editior that can help you resize your image etc, is Picnik.com

Good Luck!
R

File size and Image size are two different things. Cropping is only going to help so much, plus ruin the look of your photo.

Your looking for something like the “save for web” feature in photoshop. I am not sure if the GIMP offers optimization or not.

you can resize or reduce resolution. Irfaview is another good option on the PC side. Simple to use and free.

Both Picasa and Irfanview are really easy to use.

Since it sounds like you’ll have a lot of wedding pictures to work through after your wedding, it may be worth a time investment of a few hours now, to figure out some picture basics. These editors are free and will do that for you. Learning some cropping, resizing, resolution reduction, redeye reduction, and some conversions to black and white will take you a long way.

based on your tags, it seems you’re using iPhoto on Mac—- no need to use anything else.

in the older versions of iPhoto…..... when you export the photo from iPhoto, you can select the size. keep the aspect ratio the same (the relationship between height and width), and enter smaller numbers than what’s there already. you can guesstimate how much smaller to go based on how ‘too big’ the file is. for ex: if it’s 1 MB and needs to be .3 MB, change the maximum height from 1500 to 500.

in the newer version of iPhoto…..... you can change to a lower resolution—- which is ok if the pictures will appear small. so under ‘size’, from “large” to “medium” or something. or under ‘quality’, change from “maximum” to “medium”. etc.

either way, experiment by trying it—- you’ve got nothing to lose because the photo is still in iPhoto. once it’s on your desktop, click on it and then hit the apple key and the letter “i”—this gives you the “info” on the file—including it’s size. you’ll know if it’s small enough to upload to the website.

the easiest way in my opinion is to upload the image to imageshack.us and check the box that says resize image (pick a small size for the lowest file size) . And the uploaded image will be a much smaller size.

If you are file size is larger than Imageshack’s limit, try photobucket.com

Just remember that when you lower an image’s resolution (pixels per inch), you lose the information that was there (i.e, image quality). So be sure to save the original hi-res image, and save a copy of the low-res image, just in case you ever need the higher resolution for printing. Most monitors only display images at 72 ppi anyway, so that is the maximum you’d need for the web.

zina has it right!

And thank you zina for showing me a way to answer my own questions before answering someone elses!

Resize the image in Photoshop by setting the pixel or cm dimensions. Or save it on a lower quality setting. Cropping cuts out bits! [link removed by Fluther]