David Pogue's Digital Photography: The Missing Manual

Chapter 12. Electronic Photos

Sure, holding a beautifully rendered glossy color print (or a handsome new refrigerator magnet) created from your own digital image is a glorious feeling. But these are electronic photos—and since they're digital, you can bring them to your audience in dozens of new ways. Distributing your pictures electronically—by email, on a Web site, as a screen saver, and so on—not only costs nothing, but also offers instant gratification and a brighter, more vivid presentation.

Emailing Photos

Email offers a perfect method for quickly sending off a photo—or even a handful of photos—to friends, family, and co-workers. But the most important thing to know about emailing photos is this: Full-size photos are too big to email.

Suppose that you want to send three photos along to some friends—shots you captured with your 10-megapixel camera.

A 10-megapixel shot might consume 3 megabytes of disk space. So sending just three shots would make at least a 9-megabyte package. But alas:

• It will take a long time to send, and a long time to receive on the other end.

• Even if they do open the pictures you sent, the average high-resolution shot is much too big for the screen. It does you no good to email somebody a 10-megapixel photo (for example, 2592 x 3872 pixels) when his monitor's maximum resolution is only 1280 x 800. If you're lucky, his graphics software will intelligently shrink the image to fit his screen; otherwise, he'll see only a gigantic nose when he opens the first photo. ...