Compressing Images
Images are something that can be stored in very large files, depending on how the quality and the size of the image you’re wanting to store. For the majority of people this won’t be a problem, storing a few decent photos won’t impact on your hard drive capacity too much – but what about those people who need to store huge amounts instead? This is where the situation becomes trickier, you want to store the image but you don’t want to pay huge costs to store in on external media and maybe even online services to do it for you. In this article, we’re going to talk about a potential solution for you – compressing the images to reduce the file size.
When people see the word “compression”, they automatically assume that it is going to really impact on the quality. What we can say to this is that it can impact it if you go too far with the compression, but if you’re careful and only compress it to a certain extent you’ll still be able to view the images you love in great quality (but with a significantly smaller file size). There are a few different techniques for doing this that you may be interested in, so we’re going to talk about a few of the key ones that are most likely to help you on a larger scale.
Photos taken on cameras are usually stored in resolutions much higher than you need. If all you want is to view them back on your computer screen, you could reduce it quite a lot without noticing a difference. The average screen resolution is 1024 x 768 pixels, whereas some cameras save pictures in sizes three times this. Any number of applications should allow you to resize it, even Microsoft Paint if you want to do that. Photoshop does a good job when it comes to this, too. Storing images in lower resolutions really does save on space because a lot less data needs to be saved.
Changing the file format is something that can also reduce the size of the image, something that not everyone knows. There are really key differences in the formats (which we’ve looked at in a previous blog post, we suggest reading that). If you’re taking photos with a camera and these are being saved as JPG files, you could instead choose to save as PNG or GIF files. Some quality aspects may be lost but you should see a noticeable change in the file size, sometimes even halving it just by changing the extension. Again, a tool like Adobe Photoshop will do an excellent job at doing this.
If you use the two methods we’ve explained above you should see a great improvement in the file sizes of the graphics you store. Of course, there are many others you can do too, there are quite a few pieces of software that will compress it in other ways, this is something that you really should look into, although it most certainly will impact on the sharpness of the images. It all depends on what you need the images for, if they’re just for personal usage then there shouldn’t be any issues with doing things like this. Either way, the images will then be easier to store and can even be shared to the Ares Galaxy P2P network if you wanted to do that, you have a huge amount of freedom by doing this.
Tags: compression, images