PC help: Digital pictures are too big

Q I store the digital images that come from my camera at their full resolution. But when I wish to copy and paste these images into a Word document they appear to have changed to something called bitmaps, and they take up so much space that even a small document with a couple of pictures exceeds the 10MB that my ISP will allow me to email. How can I resize them properly?
Mike Finch

A Word documents are not a very efficient way to distribute pictures, for exactly the reason you’ve discovered. Word documents use the bitmap format to store the image, unlike the JPEG files created by most cameras, these are not compressed, so the finished documents are very large. If you’re only sending the pictures, consider sending the JPEGs themselves.

If you have an image editing program, you can resize them in this to make them smaller. Be sure to save the new file as a copy, or you will overwrite your original image with the smaller one. You can then attach the copies straight to your email, or use a web-based photo sharing service such as Flickr or Picasa. This is easier for you and your recipients, and both allow you to restrict images to certain people or groups, if you don’t want everyone to see them.

If you need to add words as well as pictures to the document, distributing it as a PDF might be a good idea, and should result in smaller files that can be read by anybody. Word isn’t able to create PDF files itself, but you can download a free PDF converter such as PDF995 or PDF Redirect.

Both integrate with Word – when they’re installed you can make a PDF by clicking the File menu and selecting Print, then choosing the PDF creator as a printer instead of your normal printer. You can then attach the PDF file to your email.

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