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. 

A good size for email attachments or web page images is 50KB (kilobytes), but many digital cameras produce JPEG files of about 4MB (megabytes). That's 4,000KB, or 80 times too large!

Download times with a typical dial-up connection

  These problems arise most often when you send images as email attachments, add them to web pages or upload them to a web site such as 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 other office applications, large image files result in huge document files that are unsuitable for sending to others.

  If you distribute your original hi-res images, you are inviting 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. 

Why are original image files so large?  

Original image files are huge for two reasons:

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

  Your original images 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.

More pixels and less compression is necessary for displaying large, high-quality images. But you don't need this for most purposes other than printing.

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 batches of images 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.