EID Study Groups: Image File Size Concerns

Study Group participants are sometimes concerned with two aspects of image files.

For one, they sometimes worry about having their files stolen from the web site in spite of the copyright notice on the site. This should not be a concern. If someone wants to steal an image from the web site, they are stealing pixels, and 500 pixels on a side aren't enough to produce a good print. For most purposes a printing resolution of 240 ppi is the lowest resolution that will produce an acceptable print. Divide a total of 500 pixels by 240 pixels per inch and you get a print of less than two inches square, hardly big enough to be worth stealing. Besides that, an image with no more than 500 pixels on its longest side is not big enough for exhibition or most club competitions, either.

The other concern is that a 100 KB file may not have enough resolution to show off an image properly. Actually, it is big enough because monitors do such a poor job of providing fine detail; even 100 KB is large enough to provide more detail than a monitor can show for most images of 500 pixels on a side. Try this: make a group of successively smaller files from the same original. Most of the time no one will not notice a loss of detail until getting to a file much smaller than 100 KB. The problem addressed by requiring an upper limit to file sizes is that many members of PSA Study Groups, and others who view the web site, use slow Internet service, so larger file sizes would take a discouragingly long time to download, for no good reason.

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