To go with johnlm's post....

[nanotech]

If you are using Windows of any kind, you have the perfect (and easiest) program available to you for resizing pics already installed:

Paint

Yes, that wonderful little program has a feature in the drop-down menu under "Image" called Stretch/Skew.

Load up your image in Paint, hit "Image" then go to "Attributes".  It will tell you the image size in pixels.  Figure out a percentage of these numbers to get you to 640X480.

Then use the "Image" > "Stretch/Skew" to shrink the image by the above found percentage.

If your image is already 640X480, but is some exorbitant file size, just load the image in Paint, then resave it under a different name.  The JPEG compression will reduce the file size each time you re-save it as a different image (hence the renaming).

Hope this helps some who are itching to post pics, but don't want to wait all night for the 4MB file to upload over dial-up!!  

[johnlm]

Nano,

Thanks for the supporting info.  I was not aware that you could do this in Paint, but then again I havent used it much.  One would think with all the ways out there to reduce the picture size it would be easy for people to get on board with doing it.

Its actually much easier than designing a wind turbine.  I guess one could turn a phrase and say 'its not wind turbine science'.

John

[johnlm]

Nano,

One more comment.  I tried the paint program approach and shrunk a pic, but my old version of paint (on this pc running windows 95) does not give you the option of saving or resaving a pic as jpg, only as several variations of bitmap files which dont have the compression capabilities of jpg.  As I, and several others mentioned some time back on this topic,  use IrfanView (a free shareware program)to resize, sharpen, adjust color and in many other ways masage pics.

John

[crashk6]

Use GIMP www.gimp.org It's slick clean and professional grade image editing, and it's open source and free. It' also cross platform will run on windows, macOS, and many incarnations of UNIX/Linux. In short anyone can use it. And FYI to all, the suppport for image resizing did not get added to MS paint until windows 98se anyone running an earlier version is out of luck.

Just get gimp,

crashK6

[hiker]

just use the lowest setting on your dig. cam,--i use the one star setting--im sure you can figure out the lowest setting on your cam...and they are still great looking pictures........later.

[crashk6]

Good tip!

Although even the lowest setting on my digital cam produces images with file sizes of 1.2mb which is not sutable for anyone on dialup... True the image is small in aspect ratio but not nesisarly file size and thats really what counts here.

The other thing to remember is that not everyone uses digital cameras... some people use scanners, photo CD's, or online picture services, in all cases file sizes are a mixed bag and in most cases require resizing to be posted to this board.

crashK6