Does reducing pixel width reduce quality?

H

Henrys

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Hi all

I am new to this forum and have recently found a liking to photography after embarking on a journey around Asia. I am taking plenty of photos but need some advice on image sizing for storage.

The size of my photos tends to be around 6MB and 4000 pixels wide, but I'm finding I am running out of room on my laptop pretty quickly, and backing it up and uploading the photos to Picasa takes ages.

I am therefore considering saving the photos to a width of around 2000 pixels - how much of an impact of image quality will this have on my photos?

My girlfriend is adamant that I should store all the pictures at full resolution, like she does (she also backs up to Picasa), but cannot give a good answer when I say "but you're not actually going to print 3000+ photos! at A3 size". She thinks that by reducing the image size, it will affect the overall image quality. I am sure she she is right to some extent, but unless I am going to be printing every image at A3 size, then perhaps the slight reduction in size/quality will not be noticeable?

Thanks in advance.
 
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Not if you're looking at it on a screen. However, can you *guarantee* that you'll never want to print them out? You will lose quality on any prints you make by reducing the resolution of the files.

Also - hard disk space is so cheap these days, is it really worth it? Get an external drive and save them on to there. In fact, buy two so you can copy to both and you've got a backup.
 
Hello Henrys. Welcome to the forum. As Leigh said, get yourself some cheap external hard drive storage. If you have a camera capable of taking good size images, it makes no sense to take them at a smaller size. Every time you reduce the pixel size - 4000 to 2000 you reduce quality and will need to sharpen.
 
if you're desperate you could take the full image and then run it through a JPG converter like irfanview, save it at 90% quality and it should take a 6MB image and make it into a 1-2Mb one I think (depending upon original quality/compression)

might not be a good idea but if you're just keeping momentoes then you can retain the resolution.
 
I'm with Leigh & Carol on this one, external hard drives are the answer.

Before buying one, check what connectivity your laptop offers, if it has an esata port then get an esata external drive as this has the fastest transfer rate, next fastest is firewire, then USB.

Try to get one at least 1TB (Terrabyte) then you shouldn't run out of space to quickly.

Being selective about the quality of the pics you keep is also a good idea, I went through my saved raw files last weekend (yes it took all weekend!) and deleted over 300GB of "oof" pics that weren't up to my standards.
 
iancandler said:
Being selective about the quality of the pics you keep is also a good idea, I went through my saved raw files last weekend (yes it took all weekend!) and deleted over 300GB of "oof" pics that weren't up to my standards.
Click to expand...

:) Same here....spent most of the weekend getting rid of 5 years worth of OOF/crappy photos.

Seemed to take a lifetime, but I got to look at photos of the kids that I had forgotten about :cool: and it also made me realise how my photography has improved a lot of the last year or so :thumbs:....photos that I thought were pretty good are slightly OOF etc and most were binned.

I make photobooks every 2 or 3 months with about 150 pics in each of the kids from Blurb and my criteria now is 'would I print them in the next book?'...if answer = no it's off to the recycle bin they go:)

So your question - yes it degrades quality + space is so cheap now = buy space and keep files big:D You might be surprised what you want printed further down the line. Quality not quantity it needs to be for me though.

This is going of topic, but the other thing I noticed was that 3 years ago I was using a Canon G7 (which I really liked pre slr) and the night time shots are so noisey that I dont dont find them up to standard/acceptable now and the ones from my old D3000 after that show a marked increase when switching to dSLR for the first time;) They dont 'pop' ether side by side and thats only with the D3000 not my D90 and better lenses. Apples with oranges here, but I hear so many people asking if a cheap dSLR is better than a decent P&S.

I have a 1 TB external Seagate USB HD (bought 2 years ago for 60 quid which I think is still pretty good?). I have that and also write to USB sticks as an extra backup every so often and keep them in a different building far away:lol:

I am away to buy a new stick as we speak and on mymemorystick.co.uk (or whatever it is) its looking like about £25/30 for 64Gb sticks (decent quality) these days - ideal for my backup of a backup to be honest:thumbs: Just buy one of them every 6 months/year and backup your main backup (I do the main every month)...I dont care how fast these are as I just leave it copying o/night once every few months.
 
I'll need a lot of DVD's for 500Gb of photos :) (OK, i'm only doing a few Gb at a time mainly, not normally a few hundred)

The things that puts me off DVD's is the varying quality between them and readers/writers of the future (you see much many issues with present day stuff.

Dont think DVD was ever as reliable as they hoped (it's not 'unrealiable' just not what was hoped). I have a few compatibility issues with players and certain disk brands that I can work around reasonably well, but this worries me a bit for the future. I know my Verbatim disks only seem to be read by my cheapo argos £13 player not the more expensive player - that sort of thing. Plenty films in my house, always kept in their box, handled carefully year or 2 old....still skip/freeze now and again on both my players.

USB isnt perfect either (what is), but in my experience a lot more reliable (maybe I've been lucky) - USB pop it it, dont worry about DVD-r/-rw, disk brand, player brand, players of the future.
 
As I was saying i'm looking for a USB stick myself and just came across Verbatim 64Gb for £21...got to be worth a punt:)
 
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