First, an update on the wedding pictures. Because they were taken with a digital camera and our photographer is a very nice lady, I have all of the pictures on a CD. However, they're about 12-15MB each, in their original state. I can shrink their dimensions to 600x400 and turn them into GIFs, and that brings them down to around 200k each. Anything lower than that, and they start to look pretty crappy.

I don't know how many people out there are on dialup, but I know most of my family is. If I put a lot of pictures up, it's going to take a considerable amount of time for those suckers to load over dialup. There's also my bandwidth charges to consider, but that's not really an issue because we don't get much traffic here anyway.

So what I'm going to do is find, like, 5 of the best, and link them in one post. So what I need from y'all is a little input. If you care at all about seeing the wedding pictures, which ones do you want to see? Ceremony pictures? Dancing? Poses? Family pictures? Wedding party? Friends? Answer in the comments, please. :)

Also, something interesting about the official pictures...There's one of our exit with the rose petals, and I don't like her angle nearly as well as the one from the table cameras (see it on the sidebar, under "recent pictures"). However, hers did solve the mystery of who took the table-camera picture--in the official exit picture, you can see the other photographer was my friend's 11-year-old daughter. That whole roll of film was well shot, too...I think the kid has an knack for photography.

Second order of business, on-programness. I've actually been quite good this weekend, and the only time I was really off plan was Friday...and even then it was close. The scale is being kind, reporting a consistent half-pound lighter each day than the day before. Currently, we're down to 181.5. I'm cautiously hoping for 180 by weigh-in day. Even if I stay where I am right now, though, a 2.5 lb loss ain't bad. Not bad at all.

I for one would love to see as many wedding photos as you are able to post.

I have some tips for you on saving photos with smaller file sizes... maybe this info will allow you to share more pictures with your friends and family.

First of all, GIFs are really not intended for photographs. A GIF is better suited to simple flat-color graphics (such as logos, etc), since you can only get up to 256 colors in a GIF. If you try to save a photo as a GIF you typically end up with much larger file sizes too.

You should instead be saving your images as JPGs (which allows for 16.7 million colors, rather than 256). Also make sure the image resolution is reduced to 72dpi, which is for on-screen viewing. The photos on your CD are print quality and I'm guessing they are at least somewhere between 150-300dpi in their original format which is going to be a huge file size, even if you reduce the physical dimensions (as you have to 640x480).

If you're using Photoshop, all of this is made easier by using the "Save For Web" feature under the File menu. You just go to that step, select JPG, then select somewhere between 35-50% quality (or Medium), and then change the image size to 640 pixels at its widest point or narrower (I would actually recommend no wider than 500 pixels for blogging purposes). If you use the "Save for web" feature you don't have to worry about the dpi resolution that I mentioned above... it will be taken care of automatically.

If you're NOT using Photoshop, you can still get your files much smaller than 200k each. The basic steps in any program are:

1. First set the resolution at 72dpi
2. Set the physical dimensions of the image to whatever you want it to be (640x480 or lower).
3. Save as a JPG with between 35-50% compression.

Just to give you an idea of what kind of file sizes you should be seeing.... I tested a high-res full color photograph. When I saved it at 50% JPG compression, 640x480, the size was about 55k. When I saved it as 500pixels wide instead, it was about 40k. Then I took the same photo and reduced the image quality to about 35% compression, and I ended up with a file size between 28-35k. The cool thing about Photoshop's "save for web" feature is it lets you see on screen how the settings will affect your image, before you save it. Makes it a lot easier to figure out which compression setting is best for any given photo, without losing too much detail.

Anyway... I know you weren't looking for unsolicited photo editing advice, but it pains me to see people stuck with image file sizes much larger than is necessary. If you need more help on any of this, feel free to email me! I'm really looking forward to seeing those wedding photos.

OMG, thank you! I can really use the help.

I'm actually using Photoshop Elements, which is pretty stripped down. I did find its "Save for Web" feature, but the default option it gives for that is to turn it into a GIF, which is why I was doing them in the first place. The quality wasn't that bad, and it cut the file size considerably. But if I can make it smaller without going to GIF, that would be awesome. I didn't see any option to "save for web" as a JPG, but I wasn't exactly poring over it :) . The original files are JPEGs, and I'm not sure what the dpi setting is...judging from the file sizes, though, 150-300 sounds about right.

I think I was missing the "change to 72 dpi" part...I'll have to mess with the software some more, see if I can get it to do what I want. I'm not much with the graphic design, and I sooo appreciate your advice.

Joy