[newcomer]

I am a novice with digital imaging and would appreciate any advice.

I have built a website to display a collection of photography (both black and white and colour).

There are 34 images in total: they are all on 35mm neg and slide film. At a digital imaging centre I am renting a film scanner to digitise the images.

For the scan I am making big .bmps - to get as much quality as possible for archiving on CD. (each .bmp is around 9MB).

I realise I need to shrink these to jpegs. What would be a good file size to aim for? I was thinking 100KB per image. How do I convert the .bmps to an exact jpeg file size?

My ISP gives me 50MB of webspace. So in total the images would take up 3400KB right? Is that 34MB?

Plus, when people access the site would they have to wait for ALL the images to load before they can navigate the site. or only the ones they choose to look at in the gallery?

cheers for any advice.

[arclight]

First, do you have access to Photoshop or Photoshop Elements? If you do you can use the save for web comand and play with the quality settings to see the best balance between quality vs. size. As far as the file sizes go there isn't any way to ensure that the file sizes are constant. JPEG compression varies from image to image. Figure out what size you want the images to be on screen and then downsample the original BMP's and save them into a new folder. By downsample I mean change the resolution to a set pixel dimension. My Nikon camera takes 1024x768 as the default size. Since you're scanning the negatives you will have much higher resolutions to come down from. A 100Kb image is a bit steep for a 56k user. If you're dead set on keeping the images large then I would recommend using thumbnails that are linked to the large images. If you have all of your images on one page at 100Kb a piecce, NOBODY will wait to see them download into the browser. I use 100Kb as my absolute ceiling for a single web page size. Any more and people get impatient and leave.

Both Photoshop and iphoto have "export as webpage" features that will build the thumbnails & optimized images for you.

[newcomer]

Thanks.

Have access to Photoshop on the machine I use for neg scanning.

I was aiming to have landscape images with width about 600, portraits 500 tall (if you see what I mean).

The gallery I have built has previous, next buttons to cycle through images, and I don't really want to use thumbnails. clearly i will have to get the file size down though.

would it make any difference if my initial scans were as smaller jpegs, rather than massive .bmps?

All this web stuff (file sizes, download speeds etc) is a right royal pain, and really seems to limit the quality you can offer.

Presumably I could build a 'website' with much better images and cooler features, burn it to CD and just mail it to the people I wanted to show my photos to.

They could navigate the site offline yes? And dial up if they wanted to follow external links which I might include?

[Mark E]

Originally posted by newcomer:
I am a novice with digital imaging and would appreciate any advice.

I have built a website to display a collection of photography (both black and white and colour).

There are 34 images in total: they are all on 35mm neg and slide film. At a digital imaging centre I am renting a film scanner to digitise the images.

For the scan I am making big .bmps - to get as much quality as possible for archiving on CD. (each .bmp is around 9MB).

I realise I need to shrink these to jpegs. What would be a good file size to aim for? I was thinking 100KB per image. How do I convert the .bmps to an exact jpeg file size?

My ISP gives me 50MB of webspace. So in total the images would take up 3400KB right? Is that 34MB?

Plus, when people access the site would they have to wait for ALL the images to load before they can navigate the site. or only the ones they choose to look at in the gallery?

cheers for any advice.

you should aim to make a gallery of thumbnail images. the thumbnails can be as small as you like, i'd recommend a width of 100 pixels (height will be something like 50-60 pixels depending on your image). you can optimise an image this size to a 3 or 4 KB.

then you can link to the full size image using the thumbnail, like so..

<a href="myimage.jpg"><img src="myimage_thumbnail.jpg"></a>

here's a couple i just knocked up. if you click the thumbnail below the larger image will open..



100kb sounds plenty big enough for an image.. are you planning on doing anything with the images, (wallpapers/desktop backgrounds?) or are they just for showing off your photography?

if it's the second choice you could get away with resizing them to about 700 pixels in width / 400 in height. (i'm giving rough estimates because i don't know the exact dimensions of your scans.)

an example.. the above large image is 700 x 464 and it's optimised to 30kb. the thumbnail is 100 x 66 and optimised to 3kb.

if you build "gallery" pages, then the only images that will load will be the tiny thumbnails, which will only take a couple of seconds each. the large images won't load unless the site viewer clicks on the thumbnail links.

hope that was helpful!

-Mark

[gadster]

OK. For maximum impact, here's what you do. Go through all your raw scans and clean them up. Using photoshop, clone out all the bits of dust and stuff, make any colour corrections, adjust curves and levels (if neccesary) and save as tiffs. Then throw away all your BMPs. BMPs are for losers. ; )

Once you have done that, and assuming that your audience has a half decent monitor, for each image go to: File -> Save for web, then wait for the dialog to appear. Change the image size to about 1000 px wide, and fiddle with the compresion settings until you are happy with the image (use jpeg HI). And don't forget to Sharpen at this point!

Save all these jpegs into a new folder. Once you have all your jpegs saved in there, go to: File -> Automate -> Web Gallery and set thumbnail size to about 200 px wide and image size to unchanged. Select your new folder as source, and make a new folder to take the new 'site'.

Check the index.html with your browser of choice. Repeat the process until you are happy with the result. If you want to customise, import the site into your HTML editor of choice and knock yourself out.

Then burn the 'site' to CD (make sure it's Mac compatible, a lot of people who may BUY your work use Macs), put in envelope, say three hail mary's and post. Good luck.