Bulk Compress for Faster Upload?

klinksk8

Does anyone here use bulk compress for faster uploading photos? I have about 10,000-14,000 photos to upload after some weekend events, and MUST find a faster way to get them uploaded. I am currently using a broadband internet connection with upload speeds at about 5800kb/s. I sure hope some of you have some advice for me. I'm basically a beginner who waded into this and is about to drown!

Thanks to any and all for advice.

Paula

jfriend

I don't know anything about what you're doing, but I have to ask. Do your viewers really need 14,000 photos? Will they really look at all of them? If they aren't heavily categorized such that a prospective viewer can easily find the 50-100 images they are looking for, most of the images are just getting lost. Is it possible that only 1/3 to 1/10 of those are really good, sellable photos?

Now, on the subject of uploading. JPEG images are already compressed, so generally a typical compression program like ZIP or something similar won't help much.

Most programs that produce JPEG images offer control over the JPEG compression level. Turn the compression level up and the images get smaller because of the additional compression. There is no free lunch though because this compression is not loss-free and some fine detail is lost in the image when compression is turned up. I don't know what software you use to manage your images, but Photoshop uses a 1-12 scale for compression (12 is the highest quality, least compression. 1 is very high compression, lower image quality). For images going online, levels 11 and 12 are a waste. Giant files and no visible difference from level 10 (which is smaller). Some people believe that even level 8 is undiscernible from level 10.

So, you could regenerate your JPEG files at a higher compression level to shrink them some before upload.

You didn't say what the goal is for uploading the photos. If the goal is only for web viewing, then you can resample your photos down to where the long size is 1600 pixels long and you will still get all the web viewing sizes that Smugmug generates. You can go down to 1280 pixels on the long side and have all Smugmug web sizes except X3.

If you're selling prints (but not digital downloads), you could upload these smaller sizes initially and use proof delay to replace the ones that are ordered before the print is made. You have to make sure and upload a large enough sizes that all print sizes you want to offer are supported though.