I have a new Nikon 950 Coolpix, and have been having fun taking family photos and e-mailing them to friends/family. The recipients have been telling me of the following problem viewing the pictures: when they open the digital photo attachment, it opens in Explorer in a very zoomed in state, i.e. they only see a small piece of the entire photo. Explorer doesnt appear to have any tools (zoom in/out; fit, etc) to aid in viewing the entire photo on the screen at once.

Any thoughts/ideas? Is this a viewer software problem on the recipients end, or is there anything I can do on my end to send the digital photo file to them in better format for viewing? Currently, to e-mail a photo, I go to Windows Explorer, find the file, click File/Send and send it off via MS Outlook. Thanks for your help.

-- mrsl_smith (mrslsmith@mediaone.net), July 09, 2000

Answers

Are you doing any resizing of the image at all before you e-mail it? I normally downsize to about 5x7 size at 72 ppi for e-mail purposes. I'll also bet that your recipients are looking at long download times.

Fred

-- fred (fdeaton@hiwaay.net), July 09, 2000.

Size your image to a maxiumum of 600 pixels on the long dimension and compress them at about level 5 to 6 as a jpeg file. You should try to keep your images below 50K for easy transmission. There is a tradeoff between an image fit for viewing on the screen and printing the image. A lower resolution image will be useless for printing but will show up not badly on the average comuter monitor.

-- jonathan ratzlaff (jonathanr@clrtech.bc.ca), July 09, 2000.

Size your image to a maxiumum of 600 pixels on the long dimension and compress them at about level 5 to 6 as a jpeg file. You should try to keep your images below 50K for easy transmission. There is a tradeoff between an image fit for viewing on the screen and printing the image. A lower resolution image will be useless for printing but will show up not badly on the average comuter monitor.

-- jonathan ratzlaff (jonathanr@clrtech.com), July 09, 2000.

This is actually a question for Fred especially and anyone else who can help. Fred said: "Are you doing any resizing of the image at all before you e-mail it? I normally downsize to about 5x7 size at 72 ppi for e-mail purposes. I'll also bet that your recipients are looking at long download times" I cannot figure out HOW to do this. I have been downloading my pictures into more than one photo software program, and cannot for the life of me find WHERE they give me this option. Do I change the dpi's? I don't think so...or do I need to change the setting on my camera to begin with, so it only takes the pix at a resolution of 640 x 480 pixels, instead of 1280 x 960? Would this reduce the size of the file without ruining the picture? Talk about long download times....I tried to send pictures the other nite and could not even get the computer to send them out---they timed out. HELP please!

-- MASmith (masmith@ismi.net), July 13, 2000.

I can't speak for other programs, but if you're using Photoshop: IMAGE -> IMAGE SIZE

In this box you will be able to resize by pixels, percent, or inches. Near the bottom you will see a box that says "RESOLUTION"; this is where you'd set 72 DPI for emailing. When you save the image as a .jpeg file, it will give you the choice of what level to compress it to.

-- Sue Bald (destiny3@ix.netcom.com), July 14, 2000.

You need to resize your pictures before emailing them or take them at a lower resolution (72 dpi for a monitor), not the best solution if you intend to print them (150-200 dpi for a printed photo). PhotoShop, as mentioned, does a great job but it's a very expensive program. There is a freeware program available called IrfanView available at "http://softwarecenter.net/irfanview/" or via a good search engine. It is considered a very good image viewer that also does some basic editing, including resizing; it'll turn those 2-meg pics into monitor size with just a few clicks (don't forget to use "save as" not "save"!). A friend of mine was sending some vacation pics overseas and not resizing them first- 5 pics: 5 megs. They went ok (we have cable access) but a message came back saying the recipients mailbox was full therefore they couldn't be delivered (the recipient was leaving their mail on the server; it was probably full of photos!). The moral of the story? resize, resize, resize.

-- George Ayer (grayer@home.com), July 15, 2000.