Sending photos in your email or placing them on a website is a common and fun thing to do. However there is a right way and wrong way to do it. I am sure you have received photos from friends and relatives in your email and it seemed like it took all day for them to open up in your mailbox. Most of the time this is because the photos were taken with a digital camera and they are huge. The proper way to send them is to prepare them first, most people do not know how to do this.

If you have ever noticed, the photos will come to you most of the time with one of three extensions, BMP,GIF or JPG. There are other extensions, but these three are the most common. These photos are measured in both pixels and bytes. Pixel size is the dimension of the photo. If you reduce the dimension of the photo, that will also reduce the number of bytes. The smaller the photo in size and the fewer bytes it contains, the faster you can send the photo and the person on the other end will also receive it faster. Most of us that use digital cameras will take the photos on the highest setting, thus producing a large photo. Sending this photo without first reducing pixels and bytes, will result in long sending and receiving time. Also some mail servers will only allow 2 or 3 megabytes to be sent and many times one photo will exceed this limit. So you see it makes since to prepare photos before sending them.

There are lots of photo editors that can prepare the pictures and many of you may already have them on your computers. There are also free editors, one that I like to use is formati 11, you can find it at jansfreeware.com If you are using Windows XP, here is another good free one for resizing images Windows XP Power Tools

Formati 11 not only will resize your photo, it will also optimize the photo. It does this by removing colors from the photo. Yours eyes can not see all of the colors that are in some photos, so removing them, many times does not affect the appearance of the photo. The bytes in many photos can be cut by as much as 40% or more without seeing much difference in the photos appearance. In formati 11, you can use the slide tool to remove some of the colors right before your eyes so you can see if the photo is loosing quality. If it is, just move the slide tool in the opposite direction to restore the quality.

Here is a tutorial that I wrote that will guide you through it, Formati 11 Tutorial