Digital cameras and other devices that take or manipulate images in some way are becoming more and more common. On top of the regular digital cameras out there, you also have video cameras that can take still photos, hand held gaming devices that can take photos, cell phones that can take photos, and more. With this technology, everyone can snap as many photos as they want without having to pay for film and developing costs. But taking so many photos also takes up space when it comes to your hard drive or other storage device. An imag
For that reason, many people choose to compress their image files in order to reduce the size. The smaller an image file is, the easier it is to email it or upload it quickly, and the faster you can download it from the web or have it load up on a website. The trick to it, though, is preserving the quality of the image in the process. Too much compression done incorrectly can cause your image to come out blurry, pixelated or otherwise fuzzy and low quality. Not enough compression, though, can leave you with enormous and unwieldy files that are too cumbersome to be able to do anything with.
So how do you shrink the number of bits and bytes in your image file without sacrificing its quality? You may have noticed that different images have different file extensions, like .jpg or .bmp or .gif. Each of those extensions indicates what type of image file you have on your hands. .jpg is one of the most common file types used for images, and the reason for that is that the .jpg file format has excellent compression qualities, making it very easy to shrink down without compromising the quality of the image, and it also lets you adjust the amount of compression on your own.
You can adjust the amount of compression on a .jpg with a program like Adobe PhotoShop or Paint Shop Pro. To do it, you must simply adjust the image compression ratio up or down as needed. The lower the ratio, the better the quality is going to be – but the bigger the actual file will be, too. The highest amount of compression will yield a very small file size but suffer from very poor image quality.
Determining the best ratio will depend on your image, so to figure it out, you just have to tinker with it until you come up with an acceptable result. If you really don't want to compress the file too much because you are afraid of losing too much image quality, then you can try reducing the actual size of the actual image itself. For example, an image with an original size of 600 x 500 pixels could be shrunk down to 400 x 300 pixels. The image should retain its clarity, but the smaller length and width of the picture itself should yield a much smaller file size.
All in all, it's a good idea to try to shrink your file sizes when it comes to images, especially if you have a ton of them. It will help you save on storage space and also make it easier to share the images with friends and family or on the Internet.
