Little One Room Apartment

[Mohammad Madha]

Nice.

It looks much better than my first one-bedroom apartment.

[Vaughn McMillan]

I use Photoscape to re-size. I size the larger size (keep relationship) and on these pictures in the thread I had do go sown to 380. I do some editing on my photos, like cropping, adjusting balance, contrast. Does this impact the total pixels?

Paul, the pixel count is not what getting you...it's the file size. You can reduce the file size a lot by increasing the compression on the photo. You don't have to ever go smaller than 800 pixels for the widest dimension if the JPEG compression is increased. I'm short of time right now, but I'll try to poke around Photoscape a bit later this evening and see if I can find where the compression option is.

[Paul Douglass]

Paul, the pixel count is not what getting you...it's the file size. You can reduce the file size a lot by increasing the compression on the photo. You don't have to ever go smaller than 800 pixels for the widest dimension if the JPEG compression is increased. I'm short of time right now, but I'll try to poke around Photoscape a bit later this evening and see if I can find where the compression option is.

I you have time it certainly would be appreciated. Maybe I just have to reduce the quality that I am saving the pictures. That seems to reduce the pixel count.

[Jim Burr]

Great little Single wide Paul...keep it away from tornadoes!!
I just use the pix resizer Vaughn links now and then. I think Some of the other forums are much harder to load to.

[Vaughn McMillan]

Paul, try this with Photoscape:

Open Photoscape and select the photo you want to resize, then click the little arrowhead on the right side of the Resize button on the Home tab. That will display a list of options like this:



Select the Reduce the longer length: 800 px option, then click Save. You'll see a dialog box like this:



Since it's always a good idea to keep your full-sized version of the file, click Save As. That open another dialog box where you can browse to the folder where you want to save the resized photo, and also change the name to whatever you want. In this case, I called the photo "Test Photo 800.jpg".



Click Save, and you'll see this dialog box. Here is where you adjust the JPG compression:



By default, Photoscape will try to save the photo at 95% quality (or 5% compression, if you want to look at it that way). Unfortunately, you can see that my test photo would still end up being 202.5 KB in size, which is bigger than the forum will allow. Now look what happens to the file size when I move the slider to the left, to 80% quality:



Bingo, I'm in. The file size is down to 117/1 KB. Increasing the compression does reduce the photo quality somewhat if you're printing it, but when viewed on a computer monitor, it's hard to see the difference between 95% quality and 80% quality.

Here's 95%...I had to use a pixel size smaller than 800 to get the file size small enough. It's 48 KB in size:



And here's the same image at 80% quality, which reduced the file size to 24.3 KB:



Pretty darned close, if you ask me, and yet only a bit more than half the file size.

I hope this helps -

[Vaughn McMillan]

Paul, try this with Photoscape:

Select the photo you want to resize, and click the little arrowhead on the right side of the Resize button on the Home tab. That will offer a list of options like this:



Select the "Reduce the longer length: 800 px" option, then click Save. You'll see a dialog box like this:



Since it's always a good idea to keep your full-sized version of the file, click Save As. That opens another dialog box where you can browse to the folder where you want to save the resized photo, and also change the name to whatever you want. In this case, I called the photo "Test Photo 800.jpg".



Click Save, and you'll see this dialog box. Here is where you adjust the JPG compression:



By default, Photoscape will try to save the photo at 95% quality (or 5% compression, if you want to look at it that way). Unfortunately, you can see that my test photo would still end up being 202.5 KB in size, which is bigger than the forum will allow. Now look what happens to the file size when I move the slider to the left, to 80% quality:



Bingo, I'm in. The file size is down to 117.1 KB. Increasing the compression does reduce the photo quality somewhat if you're printing it, but when viewed on a computer monitor, it's hard to see the difference between 95% quality and 80% quality.

Here's a different resized photo at 95% quality...I had to use a pixel size smaller than 800 to get the file size small enough. It's 48 KB in size:



And here's the same image at 80% quality, which reduced the file size to 24.3 KB:



Pretty darned close if you ask me, and yet only a bit more than half the file size.

I hope this helps -

[Paul Douglass]

Thanks Vaughn. That is how I have been doing it except I was saving a 100%. Reducing the quality when saving was the secret.

Thanks for taking the time and helping.

[Vaughn McMillan]

Glad it helped, Paul.

Another way to squeeze the file size down a bit more is to remove the Exif information. If you clear the Maintain the Exif Information check box on this dialog box you'll gain a little bit more wiggle room:

[Wayne Bower]

Very cool little apartment. I like the contrast.

[Jonathan Shively]

Are you actually going to hang this outside? If so, what glue did you use that will hold up? Excellent apartment! Some bird will be living in style.

Vaughn, great explanation! Thanks for taking the time and doing a great explanation/visual presentation.