how do I compress a jpeg file for emailing

I have a friend who unfortunatly can only get dial up service in his area. He recently bought a dig camera and has a new grandaughter and would like to send pics of her to his friends overseas. Most of the images are too big of a file and his service shuts down before he can finish emailing them. How can he compress these jpegs so he can send a smaller file without losing quality. Thanks in advance....

 

Without losing quality?

No such thing, I don't think.



You could try zipping the file, if you want the quality to remain the same..

 

ok, without losing alot of quality. thanks

 

The most basic way would be open it in mspaint and lower the resolution.

Its under Image menu > attributes.

If you have a more advanced graphics program, there are other tricks.

 

thanks Adrynalyne

 

thanks robo , seems like it might do the trick. Major geeks always come through. Great site!

 

And with IrfanView, when you save a jpeg you have a "Save Quality" setting slider that also will vary the size of the saved file. You can experiment with it to get the best combination of file size and image quality that you want.

 

If your friend has Windows XP, the Windows XP Resizer (part of the newest Windows Power Toys group) has a simple image resizer that gives excellent quality to the reduced image. And is simple to use. Just right-click an image, and choose "resize" from the pop-up menu. It's limited to several fairly standard sizes, but does great with those. You can get it here:
http://www.microsoft.com/windowsxp/pro/downloads/powertoys.asp

And as alanc notes, reducing the quality setting will shrink the file size without reducing the visual size. Going from high quality to medium quality can reduce a 1024x768 image from ~ 230 KB to ~ 79 KB.

If he's got large images (common for cameras), and is sending them just for viewing on a computer screen, I'd shrink them to 640x480, which is a comfortable viewing size, and won't choke his ISP.

 

Thats the one. Thanks GT. and everyone else

 

I know it's a little late, but Winzip has a right click feature that asks if you want to zip a file to email. The way it works is you right click the photo or the file containing the photos and a dropdown box asks you if you want to "Zip file to email" you click that and (at least in Outlook Express) an email form pops up with the zipped file already attached to it. The jpeg test file I used went from 529k to 370k.
If you need more compression, have WZ create a zip folder in the directory of your choice and move the photos to the folder. Tell Winzip to use maximum compression when you move the photos. Then attach the zip folder to your email.Winzip on MG