Originally Posted by James

With fear and trembling I have to disagree with Lisa on this one. Lisa is so good I can't ever remember doing it before! But here goes. (Actually I suspect Lisa does this too, just didn't think to write about it with this answer)

If you lower the camera setting for quality you are going to produce an inferior image record that cannot be improved should you want to use it for any other purposes. The more pixels (and larger file size) the better the picture quality.

Not only that, the camera is extremely unlikely to have such a small file size option as to solve the problem (I would say totally incapable of having one but someone would no doubt find an exception).

What you need to do is use an appropriate graphics program to help you with your image. IrfanView is a free program that even a lot of Photoshop users take advantage of for this purpose because it is so fast and simple as well as capable of opening almost any image.

Open your image in IrfanView (or other program) and resize it for the space you are going to use (choose "Image" then "Resize/resample..."). There are two settings you want to pay attention to when setting the image size you want.

First is the dimension settings (width and height). If your image is large, say even 5X7 inches and you print it at about 2X3 inches your file will be almost 6 times bigger than needed for the space and take 6 times longer to download due to the size settings alone.

Second is the pixels per inch. For the web your pictures only need to be 72 dpi. This is where you really save file size. The number of pixels per inch determines the quality of your image. The better your camera, the higher number of pixels it is capable of recording. This is great for prints but unnecessary for use on your web site. I just resized a 5X5 inch picture with only 200 dpi (camera images can be many times larger--this is one I already highly reduced) to 72 dpi. This extra reduction alone reduces the file size from 732 kilobytes to 30.9 kilobytes.

So by resizing your image file in this very simple way so that you change its width and height to what you actually plan to use on your site and then the dpi to 72 you will have a very small file rather than a large one you will take care of your problem easily.

Sorry this is so long for such a simple operation, but I have tried to be as specific as possible to make it easy to follow.