I often heard complains that uploading photos to Facebook, Friendster, etc. takes hours. As the viewer, I’m annoyed when photos doesn’t display instantly. This tip is more important if you have slow Internet connection.
Where’s the key? The filesize of uploaded photos!
We’re proud to have the highest resolution digicams - 8MB, 10MB, 14MB and even perhaps 100MB! No, just kidding but who knows the engineers are working on it? Now, ask yourself which is faster to upload (or download) - a 10MB photo or a 1MB? It’s very obvious. If you notice, computers can decently display 1.0MB or even 0.3MB photos. You can’t distinguish it from a posted 4MB photo. Yes, we don’t need 10MB photos in the Web. If everyone observes this rule, there will be less traffic in the Internet - surfing will be quicker and VoIP (w/c I’m promoting) quality will be much better.
Before we proceed to the main topic, when to use the highest resolution? They’re used to print large photos! Believe me you can’t tell a difference between a 2MB and a 10MB printed on a 4R size. But for large family wall portraits, a 2MB file will show degradation. Use 10MB.
If you want to post your 10MB photo on the Internet, upload a smaller version of the original file using a photo viewer/editor. I’m using IrfanView. It’s very powerful and it’s free. One nice feature it has - Batch Conversion/Rename feature (processing several files in one pass). You can find at the File menu. When you install this program, don’t forget to include the plugin. You can find lots of tutorials by seaching the Web. But to make things easier for you, I select this tutorial that show Batch Conversion. You can adjust the resulting file size by adjusting the photo Quality.
So, if you shoot pictures just to upload on your Facebook, etc.? Simply set your digicam to 0.3~1.0 MB!
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