re-ducing the file size of your photos.

Greetings Collectors & Photographers,

I apologize once again for being tardy in my continued posts of this very tedious art of coin "picture taking". Before I start I want to say that while there are many of you who have their own personal tips on "how they do it", for those of you who are as new to this task as I was last fall, with all due respect, try to ignore, just for the time being, urges to get too fancy too quickly. Again I can only speak from experiance that the thought of having to buy "polarizing filters" and other gadgetry is way too intimidating if you are just starting out. The tips offered by other members of late were shared with me and when I get to the end of this series of posts, I want to share all of these "over and above and beyond" tips that were shared with me and who the member was that shared them. If at that time once you have the basics down to a comfortable degree, then if you want to invest the time (and the money) to obtain some of these items, then by all means, "go for it"! But for the sake of you beginners all you need is "Irfanview", a half way decent digital camera with a "macro" setting, a cheap $15 tripod and a couple of small-medium table lamps along with the few misc. items such as the white paper for the background and some items to set your coins on such as a few books etc.

When I started I got so mad at the site here because it would not accept a pic unless it was a certain "file size". I thought in my selfish lazy way that the Collectors Society should be advanced enough to allow us to simply take a picture, get it straight, and crop off the excess and post it. In retrospect I am glad they did not make it that easy as it forced me to learn something that I otherwise may not have learned.

For posting to ebay, you don't have to worry about the size. Here you do. For your gallery shots in your indivigual sets, the pics have to be less than 120kb. For pictures included with a journal posting, the pics have to be less than 75kb. I want to say right now that having a pic to post in a journal that is very close to 75 (say 74), for some reason is not accepted many times. Why? I have no idea. This has bugged the out of me on many occasions. Same with the gallery. A pic that is 119 will not always be accepted. So I don't try to nudge right up to the limit. On a gallery pic, most of my shots are 110-117kb and I never go over 73kb for a journal pic. This way they are always accepted.

So to reduce the size of your pics, and I always have a few at the time when I do this, I roll my cursor over the thumbnails and group the photos in several groups (on paper). I will for instance have 4 or 5 that are 2.35mb and then I may have 3 or 4 more that are bigger or smaller (3.11mb or 1.98mb) To group these will help speed things up when you are deciding what % to "chop off" "size wise".

(1) To start just "double click" the big red "Irfanview cat icon" and then in the upper left of your screen, "left click" on "file" and then click "open".

(2) Then select the file of the group of pictures/thumbnails you have already cropped and wish to reduce in size. You can left click the file once and then click "open" or you can just "double click" the same file and all of your thumbnails will appear.

(3) If you have your pics already somewhat organized according to the size they have become after the cropping step, then choose a pic to reduce and again, either single click the pic and then click open or just "double click" the same pic to get the same results.

(4) Once the coin photo is displayed, in order to reduce the size, click "image" at the top left and from the drop-down choose "resize/resample".

(5) From the box that appears, hit your "back-space" key to erase the 100% and this is where you will have to experiment. What I do is start at the middle of the % spectrum and type in say 65% and then click "OK".

(6) Next from the upper left of your screen, click file and then from the drop-down click "save to original folder". Once you do this, two boxes will appear like when you were cropping your photos. (Once again this is for irfanview and in order for this to work for you beginners, you will have to have read the previous posts on this photography series) What these two boxes mean is that you are about to add another photo to your group of photos or you are about to replace one with this reduced size example. The problem is you don't know if you have the right size yet so you want to keep the previous photo "AND" this one you are reducing. A simple way to do this is to go to the bottom of the large box where it says "file name" and click on the end of the line of text. I always just type in the letter "A" (actually any letter or number will do). I then go back up to the small box at the upper right and take the scale down to the same 65% you used on the previous step. Once you have the letter "A" in the bottom left of the big box next to file name and you have 65% in the upper small box, then at the bottom of the large box you want to click "save".

(7) Once you have done that go back up to the upper left of your screen and click "file" and then click "open". You will now be able to run your cursor over the reduced in size photo and see if you are on, or at least getting close to the size you need whether it be for your gallery (less than 120kb) or for a journal posting (less than 75kb). Depending on how far I am off, I either have written down what I just used such as the 65% in both places. (having a scrap piece of paper showing what you used when your pic started out at say, 2.35mb and then doing the 65% both times gave you what? Then say the pic is still too large for your gallery but you did get it down to say 147kb (still too large for your gallery pic limit of less than 120kb) Delete that pic that's 147kb, double click your original photo & then go back through step 5 & 6 and go down to say 60% on each of the two steps in 5 & 6. The more you play with this the faster you will be, and beleive me in just a little while you will get pretty darn quick.

(8) An important thing to remember and it is what I have always done is that say you use the 65% in both steps 5 & 6 and your pic is still too large or it may have put you pic way too small, always take that size which is not acceptable to you and "delete" it. To do this just "right click" on the photo that you just changed the size on and on the drop-down click delete. You will then be asked if you want to delete that pic and it will show you the size of it so you can make sure you are deleting the one you don't want. Then click "YES". By doing this, you dont end up with a half dozen examples of the photo in sizes you don't need. This also enables you to use the letter "A" when saving that photo that you are unsure if it's going to be the correct size. If you didn't add that letter "A" or you can use any letter or number or character as this just changes that file name slightly so you won't see a box pop up that is asking if you want to "replace" that file with this changed version.

(9) But as you keep changing the size of that photo, trust me, every time you attempt a size reduction and it's not the size you want, then delete that example and try another combo of % (percentages) until you land on the right one to get your desired size. You can also try doing 65% on step 5 and 55% on step 6. Play