Today was a picture perfect day in more ways than one. We are in the middle of one of those weather spells that makes Michigan the perfect place to be; highs approaching 70, lows around 50, light breezes, and clear, blue skies. It was also the day we decided to start putting paintings and photographs back up on the walls of our new-to-us house. It’s an easy job to put off because it is slightly tedious work requiring careful measuring, trips up and down ladders, putting pencil marks on walls we paid someone to patch and paint just 7 months ago, poking holes in them with screws and nails, getting the piece actually hung, and hoping it ended up were you intended for it to be. We got 13 paintings hung, and a number of others positioned where we think they are going to hang. Not only does it make the house start to feel a lot more like home, it finally started clearing the art clutter out of the library, opening up the possibility of finishing other unpacking and shelving projects that the stacked artwork was blocking.
Today was also a day for delving a little deeper into digital image processing software. Although our website only has a few pages, and I have only been doing this blog since early June (2013), I was surprised to find out from Scott at QTH.com that our WordPress installation had already expanded to 1 Gb of disk space. While I don’t necessarily consider 1 Gb to be a lot of data, web-hosting companies do keep an eye how much resource you use, and will put caps on it and/or raise the monthly price. Any company that tells you they will give you unlimited everything for $2 /month is probably practicing the virtual reality version of bait-and-switch. Getting to that level in only 2 months seemed to indicate that I needed to do something different going forward, besides simply paying for more disk space.
The culprit, of course, was all of the photographs I have uploaded as part of the blog entries. I tend to shoot high resolution JPEGs, as they are usable for a variety of things just as they come from the camera. The images are 3,872 x 2,592 pixels (10 Mpixel sensor) and roughly 10 Mb files in raw mode. The JPEG files are typically between 2.5 – 3.5 Mb each. That’s a substantial compression compared to raw format, but 300 of those and you’ve got yourself a gigabyte of photo data. Hmmm, that sounds familiar. While 300 photos may sound like a lot, it’s only five per day for two months. I haven’t gone back to check, but I would not be surprised if that is what I have averaged.
What I find interesting is that WordPress sizes these images to 300 x 200 pixels when I insert them into a blog. That’s a reduction factor of approximately 167, suggesting a file size of approximately 20 Kb. Kate de Fuccio, who I mentioned in a recent blog post, told me that she can click on the images in the blog and get the full resolution photos. But if my intent is to only make them big enough to view in the blog, it doesn’t serve any purpose to have the hi-res files available. So, what to do? Resize before uploading, of course. The two default Microsoft programs for manipulating images on a Windows XP Pro / Office 2007 platform are Microsoft Image Composer and Paint. They can do a lot of things, but resizing images easily (or at all) is not one of them.
Lou Petkus, K9LU, of the SKP Photographers BOF had mentioned at a BOF meeting back in July that he generally shoots in raw mode and uses a couple of different free programs for a variety of post-processing tasks. We are attending a SKP Photographers BOF photography workshop/rally in October, organized by Lou, and the schedule of events indicates that there will be a session on post-processing software for digital images. I contacted Lou to find out what programs he will be discussing and to ask about re-sizing my photos prior to uploading them to WordPress. The programs he will be discussing are Faststone Image Viewer and Photoscape. He suggested I use Faststone to re-size and then sharpen the images (in that order) before uploading them. I downloaded the programs successfully and have explored Faststone Image Viewer a little bit. I will see how well it works the next time I post images.