How to Quickly Reduce The File Size of Your Photo

Hi There, this is Matt Gorney - I'm the Coordinator of Digital Media Services for Ithaca College. I'm going to show you how to quickly reduce the file size of your photos. It's important to reduce the file size of your photos for a few reasons. One is that small file sizes are easy to copy share and upload via the internet. The other is that you may be uploading to a place that has limits on file sizes or you may be given a quota for space - and it's important to work within these quotas. I'm going to show you three online resources for reducing photo size. The links are below. jpegmini.com tinypng.org and yahoo smush it On my desktop I have four common file types. A gif, jpeg, a png, and a tiff file. These are very common filetypes and you will most likely will work with these if you are working with digital photos. share and upload via the internet So let's start with a jpg. I have one here that is 20 megabytes, which is very large. The first online resource is jpegmini - jpegmini.com - just browse to this website to use this free utility. They do have a mac and windows installer if you like to download and run this as a program later on - without an internet connection. We're going to use the online utility and you can do that by clicking the "try it now" button at the top of the page. Then click "upload your photo" and browse to where your file is. For this example it's on my desktop. The jpg will upload to the jpegmini and automatically reduce the size. It also give you a nice preview f the image compared to the original. Below the photo, there is a file size comparison and with this photo we went from 20 megabytes down to about 6.7 - pretty substantial file size reduction. Click the "download photo" button to download the reduced jpg back to your computer. If you have a png file, try tinypng.org you can shrink png files right online as long as your file is under 3megabytes in size and it does a maximum of 20 images at a time. Over here on my desktop I have a png and I'm simply going to drag it in to this area of the webpage. From there, it will upload - compress - and give me a report on the file size savings that tinning just performed. So, once it's done, tinning is reporting a 67% file size saving. We went from just under 3 megabytes to 966.7 kilobytes which is a dramatic file size reduction. Click the "download" link to download the smaller png back to your computer. If you have a gif file, try Yahoo Smush it. www.smushit.com/ysmush.it It's set up the same way as the others - simply click the uploader tab - select the files to smash - browse to your file and upload it. Yahoo smash it will automatically reduce the file size and you can download smutted images back to your computer. The best way to handle any file in order to reduce it's file size is Adobe Photoshop. It's hands down the best photo editor out there and is extremely powerful for many purposes. You would greatly benefit from learning how to use this software and the TLC offers classes to learn it. So, I'm going to open the tiff file and show you how to reduce the file size with a couple of easy features in photoshop. So, I've opened the file and all I need to do is select "File" from Photoshop's top menu and "Save for the Web�" Photoshop will open a new window and display a preview image of your photo. This photo is quite large and you can see that we're only seeing the blue sky of the photo but not much else because it is just way to big to view the whole image in this window. So the first thing we can do to reduce size is to navigate to the "Image Size" properties. You can see the width and height of the image and I want to make that much smaller than what it is now. Let's go to 800 by 600. This will reduce the frame size of the photo to something that's more web friendly and we will now be able to view the image on our screen. This is one big way to reduce file size. The next thing we can do is to reduce the quality, or resolution of the image. This is where it gets tricky because we want to reduce the file size but still want it to look good. There are a few presets in the upper right corner of the window that allow us to choose the level of quality for our image. So we want to make a JPEG and we have some settings here that allow us to choose Low to Maximum. Let's try "High". That gives us an estimated file size of 114.4 kilobytes and we can see that number in the lower left hand corner of the screen here. Now let's try "Medium". Now we are now down to 56.37 kilobytes and the image still looks great. So let's go with that. Click the "Save" button in the lower right hand corner and save the image to the desktop with our other files. We already have a "photo.jpg" file and we don't want to replace that one so let's call this "photo2.jpg". So now the photo2.jpg file appears on the desktop and you can do this with any of the formats that I've been talking about - as well as a host of others. Thanks for watching!