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Do I downsize photos before upload ?
dennismv
Registered Users Posts: 5 Beginner grinner
I'm sure this has been asked, but a quick search of forum did not answer my questions to my satisfaction.
The question is: most of my original photos are 2Mb in size on average. Will it be better to use 'save for web' feature to minimize the size of files before uploading them to SmugMug ?
I know the upload is unlimited, but as I am aware, in the real world nothing is unlimited. I don't want to waste the space when I don't have to. Even if it's somebody elses.
The original resolution of my photos is so large it does not fit on my screen. Most folks will never enlarge the picture that large. If they do, it won't fit on screen. The only reason to keep high res is for prints of if you want to sell pics. I will not sell pics, and for prints I can reduce photos to 25% and still be fine for printing.
Your take ?
The question is: most of my original photos are 2Mb in size on average. Will it be better to use 'save for web' feature to minimize the size of files before uploading them to SmugMug ?
I know the upload is unlimited, but as I am aware, in the real world nothing is unlimited. I don't want to waste the space when I don't have to. Even if it's somebody elses.
The original resolution of my photos is so large it does not fit on my screen. Most folks will never enlarge the picture that large. If they do, it won't fit on screen. The only reason to keep high res is for prints of if you want to sell pics. I will not sell pics, and for prints I can reduce photos to 25% and still be fine for printing.
Your take ?
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The general advice is to upload your originals with no resizing and save them at JPEG quality level 10. That will give you the best prints, save you workflow time and, obviously, support all the sizes that Smugmug can display on screen and retain the most options in the future.
If you want to save upload time (purely your own choice) and you don't ever order prints, then you could downsize them to the X3Large size (1600px on the long side) though who's to say that Smugmug won't support larger display sizes in the future. Unless you are having problems with uploads, you retain the most flexibility if you just upload the original number of pixels with no resizing.
I only upload full pixel images myself (20,000 images in two accounts).
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Also be sure to upload at least as large as the size you want to print: http://www.smugmug.com/help/print-quality
Remember, these are *minimums* and we recommend printing from all the available pixels, not just the minimums
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I typically try to save space on my own machine. Thus, I can't get away from SmugMug's mindset of "hurt me hurt me, put the Gigs on me. And that's not all, I will store your the gigs in triplicate !! So, pile it on, I enjoy it!"
That just sounds a bit . . . masochistic to me.
And I feel like I am the S on SM, which is unsettling . . .
Then just upload the best you feel like saving in your own workflow. The point is that there's no reason to save space on Smugmug (and sacrifice print or display quality) unless you're trying to shorten the upload time and you know how to preserve good display quality when resizing.
All 20,000 original-sized images I have on Smugmug fit in 40GB which at 30 cents/GB for hard drive's these days (at retail) is about $12 of storage at retail prices or $36 if you maintain three hard drive copies of everything (which I do). If I could save half that by reducing my images some, that would be $18 of savings. Given what I spend on camera equipment, I'm certainly not trying to optimize out $18 of storage by compromising my image quality or flexibility for future edits or future enlargements. You can handle it however you want, but I thought I'd share my logic.
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when I submitted the first batch, I resized it to 25% and 113 pics total became 15Mb. Original sized photos takes up 228Mb. That's reduction to 5% and that is a lot.
In my opinion SM is crazy doing this. At the same time it is probably SM's biggest selling point. I store my own backups anyway in 2x and I have a lot of backups. Inflicting all these backups on SM is well ... indescribable. Maybe I am blowing this out of proportion, but the idea behind SM is so big it is hard for me to grasp.
EDIT: I resolve SmugMug to be concerned about this, not me. The End.