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February 09, 2006
To send the photos
Nathalie got a new digital camera for Christmas. The photos are at 5 megapixel resolution, so the JPEGs weigh 2.4 MB each.
She wanted to send 7 or 8 of these to her brother. We have asymmetric DSL, so uploading is only 1/4 the speed of downloading. Even at max. speed, each photo would take about 3 minutes to upload.
One of the techniques I showed her with the Gimp is that you can easily scale photos. When you make them 400x300 pixels, instead of their original size, the JPEGs weigh on the order of 40 KB, taking 3 seconds instead of 3 minutes each to upload.
Another technique, probably even more useful, is cropping photos. Why send all that space around the edges when you can just crop around the subject instead? Especially if you're going to shrink the photo, too. I've been trying to convince her to zoom in on her subjects, but in the meantime cropping is a partial fix.
In any case, it sure is easier than waiting for the paper photos.
Posted by Mark at February 9, 2006 08:33 PM
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