Practical Photo Sharing Tips

Have you shared your photos yet taken during christmas and new year? Gone are the days when you usually share them using the post. This time it is easy using digital snaps and the internet. In just a few clicks, your family and friends can already see whom you were with and what was in the menu.

Sometimes it is not really straight forward to upload photos, especially when you are using large photo files from an SLR or from any high megapixel camera. As they are so big, it takes time for you to upload them. And when it is uploaded, depending on what device they use to access them, your friends may have a problem in downloading them.

Here's a practical explanation on how you can upload faster and how to get a copy of a photo that can not be downloaded.

Upload Photos Faster

You can upload an image faster by reducing it's size. But before that, you might like to trim or crop the photo to remove unwanted elements. If you are using a windows computer, you do not need to additional software as the paint program can do this.  After cropping, next is to resize it. 

Paint is my favourite program to do resizing because it shows me the correct dimension as you resize it, and I find it very easy to use. Other programs automatically fill in the whole photo in the screen as a default view.

An 8.3MB photo. Using paint, you can preview the size of the image whilst using the adjustment at the right.

Here's the photo at 25% of the original size. This means it can shrink the 8.3MB at 25%  and still get a reasonably good photo size.

At this stage, I tried to resize it by 25% of the original 100%. 

If you think the size is still high, you can still resize it. I did resize it a bit more until I come up to a 679KB  from an 8.3MB photo file! This means this can be uploaded, theoretically, 12 times faster!

It will also benefit those who will be viewing your photo as they will have 12 times faster loading and use 12 times lesser bandwidth, especially those using mobiles and dongles on a low data tariff. 

Resized or not, when a photo is uploaded into a site's server, it will still be resized, especially on social networking sites like facebook. So it is better to resize whilst the photo is still at your hands to benefit from faster uploading.

Photo's Can't Be Downloaded

There are sites that the web masters disable the right click menu. This means you can not bring out the save as menu to save an image. If this is this case, a straight forward solution to copy a photo is to do a screen shot. To do this, go to a page or a photo you want to copy, press Prt Scr button, open up paint, then press paste then save. 

If you have a problem downloading emailed photos on your facebook email account using a FB application on your smartphone, do not worry, there is nothing wrong. This is just how FB designed their apps, it doesn't have the necessary button to download. The soft keys menu are not helpful as well.

Good news is, you can download this using the smartphone's built in browser. Go to http://m.facebook.com, navigate to the emailed photo attachment and a download button is just below the image. You can also use the left soft key to bring out the download menu.