Decrease file size of digital pictures?

Question

I have Olympus Master, and most of the files (pics) are greater than 1 MB. How can I get them smaller? I cropped the photo, but the file size actually increased! Any help is appreciated! Thanks. :)

Answer 1

Best Answer - Chosen by Asker

My favourite for reducing images is to use Microsoft Paint.

The thing to remember, and this is something that is overlooked, is before you do anything to an original JPG image off your camera, save a BMP (bitmap) version; do all your image manipulation using this version. Otherwise you will find that each time you do something to the image, it will degrade, being that the JPG format is extremely 'lossy'.

So, load your image into Paint, save it as a .BMP file.
Then, go to Image / Stretch/Skew.
Change the horizontal and vertical percentages to less than 100 percent (make sure they are the same percentages, or your image will look odd!).
This will reduce your image size by whatever percentage you choose.
Example: If you had an image that was 800 by 600 pixels, reducing it by 50 percent will make it 400 by 300.
Last thing to do, is to save your image as a .JPG again, so it is nice and small.
Microsoft Photo Editor also works well, and most image packages out there will have a resize feature. It's just a matter of figuring out which package you are most comfortable with.

Asker's Rating:

Asker's Comment:

thank you! It really worked!!! :)

Answer 2

most camera will give you a variety of pixel capture rates, my sony starts at 7mp, goes t o5mp and then goes all the way down to vga 600x480 which is about a 64kb picture, great for emailing but worthless above a 3x5 photo. check your options

Answer 3

Microsoft PowerToys for Windows XP

http://download.microsoft.com/download/w…

Just install it and then right click on the pic and choose resize

Answer 4

Most of the cameras have several sizes for pics. Actually, u can cropp the pic in ur computer using maybe paint, but be shure you save it as .jpg

Answer 5

I agree with jhaejhae...
Microsoft Windows PowerToys Image Resizer is the easiest.

Answer 6

So their are many ways to get the file size smaller, they all have tradeoffs. The file getting smaller means you are throwing away information which can make the photo lower qulity (sometimes barely noticeable, and other times easy to spot). So it really depends on why you are resizing it.

So you need to open the file in an image editor (Image Master is one that came with your camera probably), below is a link to an alternate editor which is simple, and powerful editor I like and it is free.

In general you should crop the photo if you have elements you don't want left in the picture, but cropping isn't required for making the file smaller.

Their are two main ways to reduce the size of the file:

1) Resize the image, so typically reducing the image by 50% or so should be fine for most people to view on screen and will cut the size down quite a lot.

2) Another major option is when you save a picture as JPG almost all editors have an option to control the amount of loss performed by compressing the image. The editors call it different things, usually though it is called quality. This can be set sometimes as you save each picture (like in Paint.Net) and other programs have a configuration option you can set it once. If the quality is set too high, it would do as you describe making the image size increase instead of decrease. Set it too low and the image will shrink dramatically in size, but will have noticeable artifacts (see link below). Most programs have a range from 1-100 to control quality. The best approach is to save the image as 4 different filenames, 90%, 70%, 40% and 10% and you should see drastic differences in size and once you learn what to look for difference in quality. A little experimenting and you can find a decent compromise of size and quality.

Depending on the purpose, it is common to do *both* resize and control the JPG quality to get the optimal file & size. Keep in for printing the images should be kept as is without reduction for best quality.

Source(s):

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compression…
http://www.eecs.wsu.edu/paint.net/

Answer 7

The camera itself will have different modes of capturing a picture depending on the resolution that is required. The amount of detail will keep on increasing as you increase the resolution of the picture and so will the size. Now you can select a resolution according to the size of the picture you want.

Answer 8

you can either change the overall size of the photos (typicall from 'High' to 'Medium' or 'Low') and you can change the compression of the photos. On the computer you can change the 'quality' rating of the image. If you increase the quality, you increase the file size.

Answer 9

This can be difficult. But too make it simple, try using a photo editing program, I use compupic form photodex

The URL is http://photodex.com/

They have a free down-loadable version.

I think it has the biggest bang for the buck.