There are some detailed notes about this, including a step-by-step guide to using a free image editor, available here. This pages just covers the basics.

If you want to send a picture to someone by e-mail, especially if you or they don't have a fast connection, or you'd like to include pictures in a document your wonderful scanned or digital camera or screen print is much too big. You need to make it smaller.

What does 'big' mean? Image sizes are measured in pixels. Cameras take pictures that may often be 1600 pixels wide by 1200 deep. Screens display something like 100 pixels per inch so those images would appear as about 16" by 12". So if you just want to show someone a 6" x 4" snap you only need 600 by 400 pixels.

Big also describes the amount of information about the colours in the picture that the computer stores. For quality printing you need as much as you can get but for small images as illustrations in documents or web pages and e-mail attachments a huge range of colours is either unecessary or may even not be displayed anyway (eg web pages only use a limited range of colours or someone's screen may be set to show less).

So you need to reduce the pixels and change the way your computer stores the image information. Luckily you don't need to know anything technical to do this as good image editing software does it for you.

1 Open your image

2 Change its pixel dimensions - maybe called resolution or image size

3 Save it with a different name (I just add an i to the original name for each reduction).

Some software will automatically save it as a jpg file which is the most commonly found type of image file size reduction and is good for photos. (An alternative, gif, is good for graphics.) If you're lucky you'll get an offer of various stages of reduction, with examples of how much quality will be lost at various levels. If not, you'll need a bit of trial and error to learn what is best for your purposes.

In some image editing programs the Save as route will not achieve what you want - in fact quite the opposite - by making a different type of file like a bitmap (bmp) or a type only recognised by that software (eg Serif PhotoPlus saves as a spp file). In these programmes you'll need to export as instead of saving as and then the Export options should offer the range referred to above.

The difference in file size can be huge. I've reduced 4MB files to 50Kb - that's 4,000,000 chunks of information down to 50,000 or just over 1% of its original size, with no discernible loss of quality on screen. About 10 seconds to download by dial-up instead of 10 minutes or more!

It may still all seem a bit technical to some but friends will appreciate your making the effort! Contact me for more information or help.