Another thing you can do to cut the amount of data is to crop. To crop a photo is to trim away the outer portions of the photo. Even the best photographers often need to fine-tune their framing. Cropping helps you feature the important objects or people in the photo. Our highlighted program, Bulk Photo Resizer, makes this perfectly easy. If you don't care for the result, you simply discard the change and try again. Our testers found it nearly impossible to make mistakes with the program. It is important to crop in order to get the best effect, but the other benefit is that you are trimming away data! The outer areas of a photo hold the most data, simply because of the square inches they cover, yet is is usually the least important part of the photo. You can get quite artistic with cropping to bring out what is important, or to shift the contents over to one side, or up or down.
There is one more way to reduce the size of the file, and it's called compression. Compressing a photo takes out some of the data, but tries not to reduce the picture quality. Of course, the more you compress, the more obvious it becomes that it's a compressed picture. There is definitely a loss of quality. But you can eliminate a lot of bytes without an obvious loss of quality. In Bulk Photo Resizer, a setting of 80 or thereabouts will cause very little degradation. Of course, if you want the highest possible resolution, you don't want to compress the photo at all. If you use 90, you probably won't be able to tell it was compressed, and you'll still see some good reduction in file size.
By the way, a side benefit of all these data-saving measures is that they upload much faster.
Here is an important point for those of you who will have some full-resolution needs, such as highly artistic photos. Your computer screen does not tell you that you have good resolution for printing, because printers, household and professional, have higher resolution than your computer screen. That is, the screen has a much lower number of pixels per inch. If someone is going to print your photos, including you, then you'll want to check on their quality before you get too far. If you have a decent printer, you can use that to test with. You can save a lot of ink by testing patches of the photo. Pick an area that will give you a good impression of its detail. Then, use a program such as Bulk Image Resizer to crop away everything but that area, and print what is left. Be sure not to save this piece of your photo unless you use a different file name, or you will hate me forever for suggesting this trick.
If you have a page layout program, you can reuse the same photo paper over and over, by placing your patches on different parts of the paper until it is used up. I have made much use of this trick, to save ink and paper, while developing graphics for music album covers.
Now you know the most important information you'll need to have your photos ready for photo sharing sites. Of course, there's plenty more to learn. Thank goodness learning is such a joy. I'm sure you'll be getting plenty of great ideas in the photo sharing community, and enjoy compliments from them as well as your friends and family.
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