Sending Perfect-Sized Pictures for Email
You have some beautiful pictures on your hard disk, and you want to send to family and friends. What will you do now? You have photos that you have experienced some strange problems, did not you? Sometimes they were so great that it is not the screen, or it was always for. In other cases, they were included in a group that, jargon and others, and be more. However, there are periods where the images came to the facilities, and you were afraid to click on it. You have little experience of reception, small picture, or with the wrong resolution.
You may have even received really cute or silly pictures that a lot of people keep forwarding to you through email. I’m sure you wouldn’t mind if your friends were sending you their own pictures, however, in some cases they get carried away.
Starting today, I assure you you’ll be sending perfectly-sized picture email attachments which appear in the right place. To start with, we need to figure out what size you want, and then we’ll tell you HOW to get the size you want.
Let’s start with the original size of your picture. At the time you took your pictures, your camera was set for a specific size. This is true whether you took those pictures from a cell phone, a web cam, or a regular digital camera. These devices came from the factory set to make pictures at a preset size. Even if a picture was just scanned, the scanner was set to output images of a certain size.
If you’re a tech wiz and familiar on how to configure your camera settings, you may already know how to set the size on your camera; however, this doesn’t mean that your picture is email-ready. If you send this photo in high-resolution, then you’ll end up with a picture that will be jumbo-sized in your email.
So, do you have to go all the way back to the Grand Canyon and take your pictures with a different setting? Fortunately, you don’t have to (unless of course you want to get other angles or scenes). If your pictures are really big, you can use a picture resizer software to convert them to just the right size.
The question is: what size is the right size? There is no universal standard size. Even if your camera has an “email” setting, this simply means that the manufacturer of the camera offers a feature to allow a smaller size that would be easy to send by email. It doesn’t necessarily mean that pictures taken with this setting will already be perfect to be attached to email.
To help you decide on what the right size is, start with the question: why you’re sending the picture? To show someone what an amazing and artistic photographer you are, then you want a big, high-resolution photo. This is also true if you need to show a great deal of detail for some reason.
Now, the question is how big is too big? It’s best to resize the picture based on a typical computer screen. You don’t need to worry too much about the different screen sizes or resolutions. It would be bothersome to call everyone and ask them what their settings are for that. They’re probably not aware of this anyway. We recommend that you choose a very common size, and subtract some width to make up for the program their using. For example, Hotmail or Yahoo Mail has columns on the side of the email that take up some space.
The most conservative choice for this is 600 pixels wide. However, if you’re sure your recipients have up-to-date monitors (at least seventeen inches is typical these days) and their vision is okay, then 800 pixel width pictures should be fine.
Now, if you just want to send some nice pictures that won’t take long to load, and won’t flood the screen with Uncle Bill’s yellow teeth, I suggest a pleasant size like 400 pixels wide. This size is big enough to see good detail without requiring a lot of time to scroll through or to download.
There is an easy-to-use program that takes care of this, Bulk Photo Resizer. You can set and apply it to resize one picture, or hundreds simultaneously. One great feature of this program is that it makes sure your picture doesn’t get stretched too wide or too tall. In technical jargon, it “maintains the aspect ratio” so you’re sure that everything is the right shape after resizing. When you select a size from the choices, the program is pre-set to take care of this for you. It’s really very handy!
One thing you really don’t want to do is enlarge your picture. Your pictures need to either stay at its original size or be smaller. Another great feature of Bulk Photo Resizer is that it won’t let you do that.
Now, what if your camera was set to a smaller size (a lower resolution) than you wanted? The only recommendation here is that you will have to set your camera for a larger size (higher resolution).
Let’s discuss the problem with enlarging. When a digital picture is enlarged, you will start seeing jagged edges called “jaggies”. These are the little squares that the image is made of. This is similar to what they do on TV to hide someone’s face and you see it turn into little squares. This is what happens when you convert a low-resolution picture into a picture that is too large. The effect causing the squares or jaggies is called pixelation.
So, how do you find out the size of your picture? Bulk Photo Resizer can tell you!
If you need to know what the size of your photo is and you don’t have software similar to Bulk Photo Resizer, you can check the photo on your computer using a Windows program called Windows Explorer. Windows explorer will help you find where your files are. First, you need find the directory that has your photos. Thumbnail view will be very helpful in finding photos. To switch to Thumbnail View, just click View (in the menu row near the top of the screen), and then select Thumbnails. Windows explorer helps you figure out what directory to look in by showing you some of the images in each directory when you are in thumbnail view.
After you find your photo, right click on its thumbnail or file name, then select Properties, and click on the Summary tab. This tab will show you the height and width of your photo in pixels.
You need to remember to make sure not to enlarge your pictures. In other words, if you want your pictures to be of smaller width, then do this by all means; however, if you want them to be larger, we assure you that you’re better off to just leave them as-is.
Have you noticed that we have only been discussing the width? This is because most pictures are wider than they are tall, so if you handle the width, then these pictures will most probably fit on your screen just fine.
Just to be complete in this discussion, here’s a scoop on large images that are taller than they are wide. In this case, you should change the height rather than the width. The conservative size is 400 pixels; however, you can probably get away with 550 pixels if your viewers have the typical seventeen-inch monitor and fairly good vision. With the Bulk Photo Resizer software, when you change your picture’s width, the height is adjusted automatically, and vice versa.
Finally, the last step is to attach the picture to your email message. Most programs like Outlook Express or an online email service such as Hotmail will allow you to simply use the Attach command. People should be able see the image in the message below whatever you write. If you’re not forwarding a message, the image should not be surrounded by a lot of junky text. If you have a very long message, be sure to tell your recipients to scroll down so they will find the picture after your long text.
