Photo editing ?

This Photo stuff is new to me, bought the Wife a Digital camera for X-mas, I've been playing around with it somewhat, I've tried sending pics via e-mail but they are HUGE, here is what I've done - loading pics on to my computer (win XP Pro SP2) from the SD card via a Kingston Card reader, opening up the Folder in the Removable drive and saving the pics I want to My Docs - most if not all are close to 900KB (jpg) - they look fine when viewed on my computer but they are HUGE when e-mailed, I know they need to resized , just don't know how to do it, I have NO photo editing software on my computer other than what comes with windows - something small and simple to use is all I'm looking for, I don't do a lot of this but would like to do it correctly when needed - my Wife has her own computer and uses the software that came with the camera, a Kodak 875 Easy Share, although she hasn't tried to e-mail anything as yet, I've heard of Irfan View and Picasa ???
Any help from you MG's will be appreciated confused

 

The Short Answer:

The Kodak 875 is an 8 Megapixel camera. (Which will get you clear shots up to freekin' BILLBOARD size </exaggeration>) Try lowering your camera's resolution. That will produce smaller pictures.

The Long Answer:

Monitors have fixed physical dimensions. For example, my 19" monitor is probably about 18" x 17" (guessing).

The computer divides the screen into pixels. This is variable. A common "resolution" (pixel dimensions for a monitor) is 1024 x 768. That means each pixel is 18/1024 inches wide and 17/768 inches tall. A higher resolution (say 1280 x 1024) results in pixels that are 18/1280 wide and 17/1024 inches tall.

Electronic files like pictures do not have explicit physical dimensions in inches/centimeters, etc. They have pixel dimensions (aka resolution) like 500 pixels x 300 pixels (for a total of 150 000 pixels).

Your camera is taking pictures with 8 MILLION pixels!!! That could be (for example) 4000 pixels x 2000 pixels, which would result in physical dimensions of 70" x 44" on my 19" monitor with a resolution of 1024 x 768. Do you really want pictures that are taller than you?


If you're still interested in photo editing software, I humbly recommend The GIMP. It's a free application that is as powerful as Adobe's photoshop. I love this app.

 

Thanks Guys, exactly what I was looking for, I'll have to play around with a couple of the suggestions to see if I like one better than another -

I did find that if I had followed thru on what Windows offers when I right clicked on a pic, I could select "send to", "e-mail" and it would ask if I wanted to resize the picture before I sent it, only problem is that it wanted to use Outlook Express and I use G-mail, I figured out a workaround and THAT method worked fine - I would prefer a program like you guys have recommended so I can resize and save in a folder for the future -

Thanks again -

Joe