Saving Photos at low resolution?

photocreations

Is there a way to save my photos with a low resolution so that they wont take up too much space on my hard drive, but at the same time allow me to increase the resolution/pixels when I want to print them?:scratch

jjbong

photocreations wrote:

Is there a way to save my photos with a low resolution so that they wont take up too much space on my hard drive, but at the same time allow me to increase the resolution/pixels when I want to print them?

Others here are much more expert on converting among various resolutions, but my math background tells me that when you convert to lower resolution, you lose information forever. There's no way to get it back, although you may be able to get a passable approximation for some purposes.

However, from my computer experience, I wonder why you are worrying about saving space. Disk technology is (and has been for a long time) on a steeper technology curve than anything else. Specifically, the amount of storage you get for a given amount of money has been increasing faster than (almost) anthing else - processor speed, memory capacity for a given amount of money, etc. This means that you can usually get big disk storage boosts cheaply.

Sure, on a system with a single hard drive, you eventually run out of space, and replacing the main drive on Windows is a pain. But you can get really huge amounts of external (USB and Firewire) storage today for a few hundred $.

BinaryFx

The request by the OP was originally where Genuine Fractals was marketed when it first came out. The marketing soon changed and it was touted for "one off enlargement" rather than the "fractal compressed/converted resolution independent master file that could be resized to any output size/resolution with little quality loss" (the original idea was to save your master file in their proprietary format for rendering to the desired resolution at need in say Photoshop or page layout software).

There are many variables that affect the file size, pixel resolution; bit depth; colour and alpha channels; noise; file format/compresson (lossless or lossy) etc.

Most photographers consider their original data/digital assets to be more critical than the file size savings gained by reducing resolution, bit depth or other factors.

It really depends on your outlook and future use of the images.


Stephen Marsh

http://members.ozemail.com.au/~binaryfx/
http://prepression.blogspot.com/

jfriend

photocreations wrote:

Is there a way to save my photos with a low resolution so that they wont take up too much space on my hard drive, but at the same time allow me to increase the resolution/pixels when I want to print them?

If you value your photographs at all, you really ought to save the original resolution. You can never recover the original resolution once you throw it away by saving at low quality or downsampling the resolution.

Yes, hard drives do fill up, but you can get a 750GB drive for $110 these days or smaller capacities for even less. If your JPEGs are 4MB each, that's 192,000 photos on that drive or about 20 photos for a penny. If you feel like it, you can delete the ones that aren't keepers, but you should keep the keepers at full resolution and quality.

colourbox

To save space on my laptop, I do the opposite of what you're asking but get the same result. I archive the high-res raw originals onto a huge external drive (that gets backed up), and every time a shoot comes through, I have Lightroom one-click export screen-res med-quality JPEG copies of all the shots, and those are small enough to fit thousands on a laptop. Those are the ones I use for reference and to know what's in my big drive. If I want a big print I go back to the big drive and retrieve the original of the same name.