Hi....Simplying, are the displayed photos from a web or email address handled by Outlook Express and Internet Explorer directly? Where might this be referenced, my books on Windows XP have little on web photos. When you save them to a file is it identical to the original? If I seem confused, that's accurate!

The reason the large files don’t seem to have as many Mb as the same file opened in Photoshop is that they are compressed in JPG format. Those same images would probably be about 18Mb in an uncompressed format like TIFF.

Most viewers don’t give a 1:1 ratio of pixels in the image to pixels onscreen unless you set them to. Even with Internet Explorer you can go Tools>Internet Options>Advanced and check “Enable Automatic Image Resizing” and Steve’s sample photos will be resized to fit your screen rather than have to scroll around to see the whole thing. Photoshop always resizes larger images so they fit in the display.

When you save the images to file or download one of Steve’s sample photos they should still be full size. They were just reduced to fit the screen if you have your viewer set to do that.

The LCD on your camera displays a very compressed version of the photo. Your camera settings determine the actual size of the recorded photo. Typically you have three or four sizes to choose from and two or three quality values (JPEG compression) to choose from. Your camera manual is the best reference on this.

In emails or web posting, the size must be kept relatively small so as to keep the file size down. Typically, when I post a photo here in the forums, I resize to make the largest dimension 700 pixels. This usually results in a file size of 100-200 kb. Anything larger than this may be rejected by some email systems or result in a long load time for 56K dialup users of web pages.

Generally, you want to set your camera to record the largest size picture and the best quality. Then after downloading to your PC, you can adjust the size to anything you want in your editing software.

Cal Rasmussen

Thanks for the comments. I'd still appreciate knowing what program does the display of the attachments and where there might be a discription. Steve's downloads here display full sized until the download is completed, then they get reduced to screensize. However a box comes up in the lower right hand corner if you put the cursor there and it allows you to adjust the size to full or screen sized at will. Works fine but I still wonder what happens exactly when I click on attachments.

I think the easiest way to explain it is to show the display options in Irfanview, which is a freeware image viewer. Say you have your images defaulted to open in Irfanview as many people do. It will display onscreen according to the display option you have selected.

So if you download a sample photo from Steve from an 8Mp camera and have “Do not fit anything” selected it will open in Irfanview the same way it looked on Steve’s site where you have to scroll around the screen to see the whole picture.

All of the other selections tell Irfanview to resize the picture so you can see the whole thing without scrolling around. The program is just resizing the picture so you can see the whole thing. There is not a 1:1 ratio of screen pixels to actual image pixels anymore. Whatever image viewer you are using usually defaults to resizing the image. You can look in the upper left corner of the screen to see what you are using for a viewer. If you are using the Windows Picture and Fax Viewer as your default viewer you can go Ctrl+A or select the “Actual Size” icon and it will switch to a 1:1 where you have to scroll around to see the whole thing. After you have “actual size” selected you can go Ctrl+B or use the “Best Fit” icon to take you back to where the whole image is displayed onscreen without having to scroll. Most viewers including Internet Explorer give you those options. Irfanview just has a few more display options.

If you click on an attachment it usually asks of you want to open the image or save it. If you open the image it just opens it in the default viewer for that image type. That viewer will likely have the option to resize the image so you can see the whole thing onscreen or go to 1:1.

Edit: I forgot to mention that the viewer resizing to show the whole thing onscreen does nothing to the image file – it is still full size. The viewer is just eliminating some pixels only for viewing.

Good. I'll look up Windows and Fax viewer, maybe purchase a better reference, and try out the other program. Thanks to everybody for the info.

What an excellent viewer, Irfanview. Very complete information on the picture and easy to use.