"Eisboch" wrote in message
...
What's the best way to reduce the size of a large picture? My options are
to reduce by pixels or by percent of the original. The originals are
typically 2-3M bytes (6.2 M byte camera) and I want to reduce to around
400-500 kbs to facilitate emailing of pictures without it being a huge
file.

Is there a preferred method (pixels vs percent of original) that maintains
the best picture quality?

Eisboch

If you are just trying to reduce the size for the purpose of email, and you
don't wish to save the smaller file for later use, Windows XP can handle it
for you on the fly. Simply right-click the file(s) you wish to email in
Explorer, and then click Send To, then click Mail Recipient. A box will
open asking if you want to make the pictures smaller or keep the original
size. Click show more options, and you can choose between small (640X480),
medium (800X600), and large (1024X768). Click OK and a new email window
will open with the file(s) already attached. You should be able to see the
file size in the attachment section of the email. You can experiment with
the small, medium, and large size to get the ending file size you are
looking for.

If, on the other hand, you have a use for the smaller file down the road, or
the small medium and large sizes aren't resulting in what you want, it would
probably be best to save a smaller version of the file with a different name
than the original, using any photo editor to resize and save the picture.
There are lots of choices in resizing an image, depending on the program you
are using. You will always want to preserve the aspect ratio. From there,
depending on the program, you can alter the pixel dimensions of one axis and
the other will follow suit. You can resize the image to a percent of the
original's size. Or, like in the email solution, you can often choose a
size that will fit inside common screen resolutions. Either of these will
result in the same quality image, if done in the same program. You will
probably want to resample the image in the resizing process. There are
usually different resampling interpolation methods, each trading speed for
quality.

I use Adobe PhotoShop Elements to do this, mostly because it's where I do my
editing. However, for image viewing, I use IranView. IrfanView is just
about the slickest image viewer out there. It's fast, efficient and free.
It will handle editing chores, but not at the level of PhotoShop. It will,
however, easily handle any resizing duties easily. It can be found at
www.irfanview.com.