Change your dial up woes

[Save Old Iron 1,571]

Several folks have voiced issues with using dialup modem services to connect to Red Square. Since I am a "visual learner" and post my share of pictures, I thought this would be another good opportunity for Save_old _iron to once again put his money where his mouth is and help out those who must suffer the slings and arrows of my frequent "visual" contributions.

I'm sure we all realize the larger the file size (picture size) the longer any internet service takes to load the image into your PC. Not only does the transfer of the image to your PC take a finite amount of time, once in your PC, the internet browser you use must calculate how to display this image on your screen. If someone posts a gigantic 2+ megabyte photo with high resolutions, the internet browser must use computer processing time and resources to "scale down" the massive image to fit on your screen.

Realizing not everyone has a fast 3GHZ PC with multiple gigs of RAM, I have what appears to be a solution to allow even the most modest PC to download / upload and display quality images thru the Red Square site.

Consider the program PicSizer from AxiomX software

http://www.axiomx.com/

IT'S FREE and its backwardly compatible with previous versions of Windows. So if your still on Windows 95, your still good to go with this free software.

Download you copy from their website , load it up and follow the directions.

Here is a dramatic result I achieved on one image taken from one of my previous posts. The image was chosen due to its level of fine detail present in the picture (grass clippings). Any degradation in the quality of the photo will show up in the fine details.

So lets start with how significant the file size savings can be.

Here is the example I chose to use for this post

The original image from my 5 Megapixel camera came out at a screen resolution of 2592 x 1944 pixels (about 4 times bigger than your monitor can display). The file size is a whopping 2.207 megabyte and would take about 5 minutes 7 seconds just to download this one image to your PC via 56K modem dial up access.

The next image below is a PicSizer image I processed to scale the 2+ megabyte image down to a good viewable size (800x600).

The resulting image is now 403K or 5 times smaller in size. This image would still take 59 seconds to download to your PC thru dialup service.

We could continue to make the image smaller and make more gains but 800 x 600 is a very comfortable viewing size on most monitors.

Now comes a little software magic called image compression. PicSizer allows you to extract out some detail in the picture by varying what it calls JPEG Image Quality.

Your images can be reprocessed with varying degrees of image compression and thereby lowering the file size of the image file.

I saved the very same image in 3 additional levels of "quality" for your scrutiny. Lets compare the images, their file sizes and download times, Then you decide if a few seconds processing your pics thru PicSizer is worth the effort.

First is 800 x 600 with 50% quality - 54K (WOW) file size - download time about 8 seconds via dial up and to me, virtually indistinguishable from the previous photo.

Very nice and a DRAMATIC improvement in upload and download times to your PC

Next is 800 x 600 with 25% quality - 36K - download time is around 5 seconds

I see a little loss in detail but not much gain in download time. 8 seconds vs 5 seconds

It is not until we knock the "quality" setting down to around 5% that we start to see obvious degradation in the image - note the "blockiness" in the finer detail in the image - particularly in the finger details.

This image does get the message across that there is a connector full of grass on my tractor, but we have taken the image compression too far and now suffer from noticeable degradation in the image and not much file size savings to show for it.

File size has been reduced to 21 KB with a calculated download time of about 3 seconds for 56K dialup modem service.

So enjoy experimenting with PicSizer. There are certainly many other products out there on the internet. I thought I would mention this one as I have some history using it. One additonal nice feature of PicSizer is the "batch" mode. If you would like to post 10 squirrel, I mean tractor pictures instead of 1, the batch mode allows you to select all 10 at one time, one keypress later all pics are now reduced in size to make quick uploads to the Red Square. A great byproduct of this file reduction is the ability to bypass the need for file services such as Photobucket. If you can get the picture size below 56K, Red Square can store the picture and uploading and linking to Photobucket is no longer necessary. This saves you even more frustration.

Enjoy.

p.s. the calculations I used for download time can be reproduced on this site.

http://www.t1shopper.com/tools/calculate/d...dcalculator.php

[rmaynard 16,572]

Great info Chuck.

Bob

[T-Mo-(Moderator) 4,643]

I use irfanview on my work pc, works great.

http://www.irfanview.com/

[Roger from southern Iowa 1]

Thanks for the tip, sounds user friendly.

[horsefeathers 15]

SAVE_OLD_IRON, I think I'am a target for some of those arrows!

I loaded the AxiomX PicSizer. I'll see if can make this work!

Electrical troubleshooter, Computer wiz, And friend of nature! (squirrels)

Is there anything you can't do?

Thank You!

HORSEFEATHERS!

[Save Old Iron 1,571]

Is there anything you can't do?

Yes - weld and climb the rope in gym class. They stick right out in my memory.

[DoctorHfuhruhurr 137]

I like big photos, they come in great on my 55" LCD

there's always satellite Internet

[rmaynard 16,572]

there's always satellite Internet

As long as you've got the big bucks to spend initially on equipment, then a huge monthly fee for service.

That all is assuming that you don't live in a heavily wooded area such as where I am.

Bob

[Curmudgeon 28]

Big photos SUCK!

I'm on a netbook with an 8.9" screen. It's what I can afford. While I recently went from dial up to cable so downloads are faster, when only part of the picture can be displayed it's pretty close to useless.

For everyone rolling in the dough with all the latest and greatest and biggest and fastest, how about sharing!!!!!!

Sounds like save old iron lives in the real world, and I for one will applaud his sharing. :D

[Save Old Iron 1,571]

Sounds like save old iron lives in the real world, and I for one will applaud his sharing.

Yep that's me - real world alright.

SOI helps to resize the world to 640 x 480 one pic at a time.

[horsefeathers 15]

save_old_iron, HHEELLPP!! I loaded axiomx,created a folder,ran setup!

I can weld, climb rope, shape steel, paint,and draw but I can not run a computer!

My photos are huge 4000x3000 4.14MB and I can't size them down!

Did I miss somthing? And if I can down size them. How do I upload to RS?

Ain't we a handsom pair?

Rocky the flying squirrel and Bullwinkel the big dumb moose!

uoY knahT!

HORSEFEATHERS!

[Save Old Iron 1,571]

No problem Bud,

check this out

Step 1 - press LOAD - it will give you the standard windows view of your computer files in a tree format

select what folder your pics are in and then select what photo you want from the file.

you should now see the photo you want to resize in the PicSizer program

Step 2 - the size of your picture will normally show up in these windows - if the picture is larger than 1024 x 761 then its automatically downsized to 1024 x761 to start off. This is the max size PicSizer will process but we are talking about downsizing pics, right ?

Click in the WIDTH box and type in the width of the picture you desire - for RS, 640 or 800 pix width will be great. As long as you leave the CONSTRAIN PROPORTIONS option checked, your picture height will be proportional to its new width. Leave this box checked.

So, if you arrow the width to 640 or click in the width box and type 640, your picture will be resized down to 640 by 480.

If you select a width of 800, your height will probably be 600. This are standard dimensions for a digital picture.

As you select your WIDTH, the picture in the PicSizer program automatically displays its smaller size on the screen. Again, stick with 640 x 480 or 800 x 600.

Step 3 - Click SAVE - the windows program will present you with a standard "Save Image" screen

change save as type to JPEG and hit SAVE

you will have an opportunity to change the JPG COMPRESSION QUALITY setting for image compression and file size reduction. Start with a 50% setting. and select OK.

That's it - your new file is saved in the folder and under the name you chose in that folder.

If you want to retain the original image, name the smaller image with a slightly different name. Tat way you have the best of both worlds, a small uploader image and a full quality original.

When you upload to the file sharing program (Photobucket, Flickr, etc) upload the smaller renamed image.

Let me know if you need further help.

[Save Old Iron 1,571]

Just as an FYI

the instructions I gave above process a single picture at a time.

The entire right side of the PicSizer screen is for "batch" or processing multiple pictures at the same time with all the same settings.

We can cover that part of the program in a latter post.