fpw
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Joined: 28 Nov 2003
Posts: 429
Location: Southern California
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 Posted: Sat Jul 15, 2006 10:55 am Post subject: Photos too large in email? Easy fix. |
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Here is a common question:
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Q. When I drag digital pictures into an e-mail message, they come in huge and fill up the screen, making it impossible to see the entire image at once. Can I adjust the size of photos so they fit in the message window?
A. Giant photo syndrome can occur when the resolution of the digital picture exceeds that of the computer monitor. Although the computer’s graphics software can sometimes correct the situation and reduce the image’s display to fit properly on the screen, this is not always the case.
Digital photographs are made up of pixels — the word is short for “picture elements” — and a pixel is a single point in an image. The total image resolution of a photo taken with a three-megapixel camera, for example, is about 2,048 by 1,536 pixels — which, when multiplied together, is more than three million pixels working together to make up the picture.
Monitor resolution is also measured in pixels, and most monitors these days use screen resolutions of 800 by 600 pixels; 1,024 by 768 pixels; or 1,152 by 864 pixels. All of these resolutions are smaller than a three-megapixel photo, so when the photo is displayed at its full size, it exceeds the monitor’s screen size. But both Windows XP and Mac OS X give you the opportunity to shrink photos to resolutions that fit better on a computer screen, like 640 by 480 pixels.
The Easy Fix
In Windows XP, click to select the photos you want to send from My Pictures or another location on your computer. After you have selected the pictures, click in the “E-mail selected items” option in the task pane. You can also right-click with the mouse and select “Send to Mail Recipient” from the pop-up menu.
In the resulting box, click the button next to “Make all my pictures smaller” and then on the link for “Show more options” to see a selection of resolutions to use for the picture attachments. Choose one and click O.K. Google’s Picasa photo-management program for Windows and Linux (free to download at http://picasa.google.com) can also shrink photo attachments. |
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