You have a couple of problems. First, yes, the "size" of the images is much
too big. But let me clarify a bit. There are several factors that are
involved in measuring images. One is physical dimensions (in pixels). A
pixel is the smallest unit of your screen. Your screen is made up of many
pixels, each one a tiny square of a single color. When you hear talk about
"screen resolution," you're hearing talk about how many pixels wide and how
many pixels high your monitor screen is. Most monitors are capable of
several different standard sizes, anywhere from 640X480 to 1280X1024 and
even larger. How many pixels are displayed determines the level of detail of
your screen resolution. Fewer, larger pixels show less detail. Many smaller
pixels shows a high degree of detail. The actual number of pixels on your
screen can be obtained by multiplying the height by the width of your screen
resolution.
Now, these pictures were taken with a digital camera. A digital camera
achieves a very high degree of detail by creating very large images that
have many many pixels in them. Our camera takes pictures, for example, that
are 2048X1536 pixels in size. Some digital camera take even larger, more
highly-detailes images. Some are capable of taking better pictures than the
non-digital ones can. I downloaded 3 of your images, and after your
cropping, they were in the neighborhood (more or less each) of 1000 or so X
960 or so in size.
Now we get to the trikier part. First, the number of pixels has nothing
whatsoever to do with the physical size of the image. In fact, the image has
no physical size. As you may remember, I said that monitors can display
pixels in a variety of sizes, depending upon the resolution. A printer can
print larger or smaller dots. And if you use Internet Explorer, by default
it will resize images that are larger than your screen to display them.
In addition, images can be stretched and resized in a variety of ways
visually by software (like Internet Explorer).
But wait! There's more! Because of the limitations of computers in terms of
storage space, processor resources, and memory, a variety of "compression
formats" have been developed, which allow images to be made smaller in
"size" (how many bytes of memory or hard drive space they occupy). When an
image is compressed, it takes up less space in memory or on the hard drive,
and even more importantly, less time to upload or download (when viewing it
on a web site, for example). A Digital camera doesn't compress an image at
all. So, the size (in bytes) of your images is very large as well. The
largest of the 3 I looked at was 575 KB in size. The smallest was 372 KB in
size. On a web site, that is unacceptably huge.
So, you have a few options. Compressing your images will probably reduce the
quality of the image. Perhaps it will not make a difference when viewed in a
browser. But it might be a good idea. And resizing them, not by cropping,
but by actually resizing, would be a good idea. Now, you don't necessarily
need to go out and buy Photoshop or some other imaging software to do this.
In fact, it can be done using Windows Paint for XP. Paint won't do any
compression, but it can certainly resize the image. I took one of your
images and resized it in Paint to half its size. It went from 372 KB in size
to 85 KB in size. That's an improvement!
--
HTH,
Kevin Spencer
Microsoft MVP
Professional Numbskull
Hard work is a medication for which
there is no placebo.
