Want to add photo; yet file to large; what format?

[Dominic123]

Snapped a couple pics and trying to upload them yet get error message that photo is too large; its just a regualr pic, what format are you saving or converting to be able to upload??

Thanks

[Alfieboy]

I got the same, I went into Microsoft's free Paint tool and resized it to 20 or 30% (can't remember exactly) and it uploaded fine, with decent size.

[Loren]

JPG, PNG, GIF are all acceptable formats.

As a regular member you are limited to:

1 MB per post (which is really too large anyway). Most images can be seen (and downloaded) by al are under 200 K.

[therock88]

To add to what Loren has indicated...1 MB is very large for a photo. A few things affect the file size; Color depth, pixel depth, size, and format. For photos, GIF is not a good choice as it has no compression algorithm and only supports up to 256 colors. Your best bet for a color photo is JPG or PNG....Both use a lossy compression algorithm and have color depths of 16 million colors +. I would suggest you set your photo to .JPG at 72 DPI pixel resolution and size it no more than 800 pixels wide. If you have an application that allows scaling of the compression(quality), anything over 60% will look very good and still maintain a relatively small file size.

I have attached 3 photos for reference: One is a 60% compression JPG that only requires 113K File size and you can see it is clear. One is the same file as GIF. It takes 233K file size and is very pixelated. The last file is another JPG at 100% (no compression) and takes 322K file size and looks no better than at 60%.

Hope that helps!

DC

Edited July 10, 2010 by therock88