Before I post photos, I nearly always resize them. That way, when viewers click on a photo, they see a version of it that fills the screen just right, and because the file size has shrunk, even folks on dial-up don't have to wait a long time to see the larger photo. It can be annoying when you click on a photo wanting to see the faces better, but your screen is filled with background and you have to use the slide bars to find the faces. That means the photo that was uploaded has a resolution that is quite high. My screen resolution is set at 1280 x 1024, as are most people's. But the photos that come out of my digital camera are much bigger (2592 x 1944) so to make a photo fit nicely in the viewable area, I need to resize it.
I took 5000 photos last year, and I have a resized copy of each one. How did I do it? I used a photo editing program and let it do the work for me. I have a $50 program called Adobe Photoshop Elements. With it, I can batch process photos. In other words, I can type in the settings, and click "Okay" and the computer does the rest. It can resize thousands of photos one by one after I "tell it to", in a very short amount of time. But what if my photos are all in different folders? No problem. I can place them all in one folder and check the box that says, "Include all subfolders" when resizing.
For organization's sake, I make a folder called "smaller" on my computer, and send all the resized photos to that folder. I usually save in jpeg high quality format, at 1000 pixels wide, and I choose 96 dpi (dots per inch). After the program is finished, I go to that "smaller" folder and see that my photos are just the right size for blogging, and their file sizes have been reduced by as much as 10 times. That makes loading and viewing very fast, but the photo quality is still good. And I keep my original photo in its original folder, in case I want the original later. Here's a screen shot of the setup page for batch processing photos.
Eventually, all of this won't be necessary, because the newer digital cameras are going to have software that put two copies of photos on your hard drive, one original and one small one for blogging. But this is still good to know or have in case the new cameras make blogging photos that are too small.
