Why Image Resizing is Important

Today's Image Files

Image files from your digital camera or scanner are far too large to send over the Internet. These original files take forever to download, especially on a dial-up connection. 

  These problems arise most often when you send images as email attachments, add them to web pages or upload them to eBay.

  If you post images to photo sharing web sites, you'll find that they won't accept files above a certain size. 

  If you create illustrated documents with MS Word, PowerPoint or similar applications, large image files result in huge document files.

  If you distribute your original hi-res images, you have a much greater risk of unauthorized use or copying. 

For all these reasons, it is essential to resize original images before using them for these tasks. Sending giant original files will quickly make you unpopular or drive visitors away from your web site. 

How big is too big?  

A good size for email attachments or web page images is 50KB (kilobytes), but many digital cameras produce JPEG files of about 2MB (megabytes). That's 2,000KB, or 40 times too large!

Download times with a typical dial-up connection

Why are original image files so large?  

These files are huge for two reasons:

  They contain many more pixels than you need to display them on a computer screen. Most won't even fit on the screen without scaling, forcing people to scroll around.

  Your original files are not compressed very much, in order to preserve image quality. Remember, with JPEG files you can trade-off file size for image quality. See details here.

You need the very high quality of the original files for printing images, but not for most other purposes.

Resizing images involves reducing the pixel dimensions and using higher JPEG compression. Both of these actions reduce file sizes dramatically. Doing the job right actually requires additional steps, such as re-sharpening. 

Speed and Efficiency

Many image editing programs will let you resize images and save them with higher compression, but they are very tedious to use, especially when you have more than one image to prepare. 

JpegSizer automates the process in a very efficient way, so that getting your  images ready for the Internet is really fast and simple.