Jul 14, 2008 - Maximize Your Personal Photo Storage at DigStreetRacing.com

Every person that signs up for a membership to DigStreetRacing.com will receive, among some other great benefits, 10 megabytes of personal photo storage. But when most digital cameras are taking photos that exceed 1 megabyte in size a piece, is 10 megabytes really that much? YES! You can actually store 70 to 100 photos in 10 megabytes with the right knowledge. I've tried to make the technical explanations in this article as simple as possible, and if you can at least understand a little bit of what I'm talking about, it will help you to understand how photos are stored within a computer and what you can do to make them take up less space.

In order to proceed, a basic understanding of the term "resolution" is needed. When your computer displays images on the screen, the image is actually made up of many tiny dots that are smaller than the head of a pin. These "dots" are known as "pixels". Each one of these pixels is a different color -- and when grouped together on the screen, all of these tiny, different-colored pixels appear to our eyes as one big picture. The pixels are laid out in a grid of a specific size, such as 1024x768 (pronounced "ten-twenty-four by seven-sixty-eight" and meaning 1024 pixels wide by 768 pixels high) or 1280x1024 (pronounced "twelve-eighty by ten-twenty-four" and meaning 1280 pixels wide by 1024 pixels high). The size of this grid is the resolution of the picture. So, 1024x768 is a resolution, and so is 1280x1024.

If you'll recall the simple middle-school formula for calculating the area of a rectangle, it's length multiplied by width. This formula can be used to calculate how many total pixels are used to form the picture that you see with your eyes. Take the resolution 1024x768, for example. If we multiply 1024(width) by 768(height), we can see that there are 786,432 total pixels in an image of that resolution. Now do the same with the resolution 1280x1024 -- multiply 1280(width) by 1024(height) to get a total of 1,310,720 pixels in an image of that resolution. When looking directly at the difference between "1024x768" and "1280x1024", it might appear that there is not much difference between the two sets of numbers. After all, 1280 is not much bigger than 1024, and 1024 is not much bigger than 768... But when we look at the total number of pixels used in these two resolutions, we can see that a 1280x1024 resolution actually uses about 600,000 more pixels to store photo information than a 1024x768 resolution.

Hopefully you're still with me at this point! Each pixel that's displayed on the screen is a different color. So as stated before, a photo saved in the resolution 1024x768 contains 1024 multiplied by 768, or 786,432, total pixels that each represents a color. When the computer stores this photograph on the hard drive or on a memory stick, it must store the color information for EACH of the 786,432 pixels separately. The color information for each pixel takes up a certain amount of space on the hard drive, and recording color information for 786,432 separate pixels takes up a lot of space. A photo stored in 1280x1024 resolution contains 1280 multiplied by 1024, or 1,310,720, pixels. So once again, this means that storing a photo in 1280x1024 resolution requires approximately 600,000 more pixels worth of color information than storing a photo in 1024x768 resolution. That means a photo stored in 1280x1024 resolution requires almost TWICE the amount of room on the hard drive/memory stick than a photo stored in 1024x768 resolution!!!

Okay, that was the hard part -- now for the easy part! Most digital cameras are set to take photographs in an extremely high quality resolution. This ensures that clear, vivid photographs are produced that accurately represent the real world. While this is great for having the photos printed at London Drugs, CVS, Ritz Camera, or another professional photo printing service, it is overkill for sharing pictures on the Internet. While pictures are generally best viewed over the Internet at resolutions of 320x200, digital cameras generally take pictures at resolutions in excess of 2048x1536. Let's use the formula discussed above to determine the total amount of pixels used to store a photograph in these two different resolutions:

• 320 multiplied by 200 is 64,000, meaning that an image in a resolution of 320x200 requires 64,000 pixels worth of color information to be stored on the hard drive or memory stick.
• 2048 multiplied by 1536 is 3,145,728, meaning that an image in a resolution of 2048x1536 requires 3,145,728 pixels worth of color information to be stored on the hard drive or memory stick.

While this might be a little confusing, it doesn't take a rocket scientist to figure out that 3,145,728 is a much higher number than 64,000!!!!!! Fifty times higher, to be exact. That means a photo stored in 2048x1536 resolution requires fifty times more space on your hard drive or memory stick than a photo stored in 320x200 resolution.

So what can you do to reduce the amount of space required to store your photo to 1/50th of its current size? Reduce the resolution. Any basic photo editing software will allow you to reduce image resolution (often simply called "image size" in these programs). If you own a digital camera, it probably came with some basic photo editing software. There are also a number of free ones that can be found on the Internet. Open a photo using one of these programs and look for a way to change the size of the image. When modifying image size, it's important that the width and height remain in proportion to each other -- that is, if you reduce the height by 50%, you must also reduce the width by 50% or the image will become wider than it is tall causing distortion of the picture. Your goal is to reduce the picture to a size close to 320x200. You may not get the picture to reduce to that exact size.. It may be 315x198, 300x225, 400x350, 299x137, or any other number close to 320x200 -- the important part is that you reduce the number of pixels required to store the color information of the picture. Then save the modified picture as a JPEG (.JPG) and if an option is given to choose quality or compression, set it to "70%" or "7", depending on the option given by the program you are using. This will further reduce the amount of storage space required by the photograph by compressing it, or squeezing it down into a smaller space!

Using the above information and procedure, you can successfully reduce a photograph from several megabytes in size to about 1/10th of a megabyte in size -- allowing you to fit 70 to 100 photos within 10 megabytes of storage space!

If you have any questions or comments, feel free to post them below or email them to mrdigs@digstreetracing.com.