I'll give it a try thanks!
OMG that was much better what the heck is that other format using up so much space for?!
Photobucket STINKS!
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Astro Forever
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It's not for the web, that's for sure. Since a .bmp file is not compressed, its quality is better, and it would be better suited when that is what is important, such as printing an important document, an ad, or whatever.
But you have white space for no reason in that image. I'm having a little bit of a hard time explaining how to change that in Paint, I'll try to come with an explanation later.
But you have white space for no reason in that image. I'm having a little bit of a hard time explaining how to change that in Paint, I'll try to come with an explanation later.
I'm going to get technical, because I feel like it. 
A normal picture needs 3 bytes per pixel, one each for its amount of red, green and blue. So a 1255x1202 picture needs 1255x1202x3 bytes, or 4.52MB. This is how a BMP file saves it, and you end up with big files.
Saving it as a GIF, JPG or PNG will compress it using various algorithms.
JPG breaks the picture down into 8x8 pixel squares, then it looks for squares that are similar. If it finds squares that are the same, or close enough that no one will notice the difference, it just records it as a duplicate square instead of storing the whole 192 bytes. This is great for photos, but not so good for sharp line drawings or window screen captures, because the sharp lines get smudged to make them look more like other areas.
You don't want to edit and resave a JPG too many times, because each time it'll lose some quality.
GIF pictures keep all the information intact, so they're good for line drawings where you want to keep it crisp. Unfortunately the technology is old so you can't have more than 256 different colours in one picture. It's also licenced, so it's being phased out on the Internet. I admit I still use it a bit for small icons. It's also the only format in widespread use that lets you have animations.
PNG keeps the picture sharp and intact, but lets you have as many colours as a JPG file. So it's sort of like a super-GIF format. This is becoming more popular, certainly as a replacement for GIF. It's not quite as small as JPG files though, because it doesn't cut corners by reducing quality like JPG does.
There's also a format called MNG, which is like PNG but for animations, but not many browsers support it.
I'm not sure why your picture was so big on the screen. Perhaps it had been used for a web site background image. Anyway, I cropped it with Paintshop Pro and resaved it.
Edit: You can crop with Windows Paint. In the bottom right corner of the image is a little blue square that you can click-and-drag. This changes the frame of the picture and you can make it smaller.
A normal picture needs 3 bytes per pixel, one each for its amount of red, green and blue. So a 1255x1202 picture needs 1255x1202x3 bytes, or 4.52MB. This is how a BMP file saves it, and you end up with big files.
Saving it as a GIF, JPG or PNG will compress it using various algorithms.
JPG breaks the picture down into 8x8 pixel squares, then it looks for squares that are similar. If it finds squares that are the same, or close enough that no one will notice the difference, it just records it as a duplicate square instead of storing the whole 192 bytes. This is great for photos, but not so good for sharp line drawings or window screen captures, because the sharp lines get smudged to make them look more like other areas.
You don't want to edit and resave a JPG too many times, because each time it'll lose some quality.
GIF pictures keep all the information intact, so they're good for line drawings where you want to keep it crisp. Unfortunately the technology is old so you can't have more than 256 different colours in one picture. It's also licenced, so it's being phased out on the Internet. I admit I still use it a bit for small icons. It's also the only format in widespread use that lets you have animations.
PNG keeps the picture sharp and intact, but lets you have as many colours as a JPG file. So it's sort of like a super-GIF format. This is becoming more popular, certainly as a replacement for GIF. It's not quite as small as JPG files though, because it doesn't cut corners by reducing quality like JPG does.
There's also a format called MNG, which is like PNG but for animations, but not many browsers support it.
I'm not sure why your picture was so big on the screen. Perhaps it had been used for a web site background image. Anyway, I cropped it with Paintshop Pro and resaved it.
Edit: You can crop with Windows Paint. In the bottom right corner of the image is a little blue square that you can click-and-drag. This changes the frame of the picture and you can make it smaller.
Last edited by DrFrag on Tue Aug 15, 2006 8:04 am, edited 1 time in total.
About conversion between formats, you can use Gimp. It is a very powerfull image editor, but it is very simple to use as an image converter. Just use the "save as" capability 
The real sign that someone has become a fanatic is that he completely loses his sense of humor about some important facet of his life. When humor goes, it means he's lost his perspective.
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Star Wars - Exile
I personally like Photobucket better than Imageshack. It seems that Photobucket has faster upload times (for me) and its easy to keep track of pictures since it saves them to your album.
Last edited by Latu on Sat Aug 19, 2006 1:12 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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starvation and poverty,
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Astro Forever
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Latu wrote:I personally like Photobucket better than Imageshack. It seems that Photobucket has faster upload times (for me) and its easy to keep track of pictures since it saves them to your album.
If you register on Imageshack, you'll be able to keep track of all your pictures, but you can't move them into different albums. I still prefer Photobucket for that reason.
DrFrag wrote:I'm going to get technical, because I feel like it.
A normal picture needs 3 bytes per pixel, one each for its amount of red, green and blue. So a 1255x1202 picture needs 1255x1202x3 bytes, or 4.52MB. This is how a BMP file saves it, and you end up with big files.
Saving it as a GIF, JPG or PNG will compress it using various algorithms.
...
I recall being able to reduce the color resolution all the way down to 1 bit per pixel, maybe that was a scanner setting, I cannot recall. Regardless, in whichever format the image was saved, it was a very small file size.
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