Image Resampling for Idiots

Voronwë · Post by **Voronwë** » February 7, 2005, 5:15 pm

Maybe you have faced this problem at work.

I am sick of getting 18 fucking megabyte attachments that are 5 page word documents with one graphic on there, that could easily be a JPG.

There are no technological limitations where this 18MB impedes my work effectiveness.

HOWEVER, i feel this deep need to instruct people that sending 18MB email attachments when the file could be 40kb is MORONIC.

So this leads to my question. Does anybody have a nice way to explain to somebody who is a completely ignorant PC user (but not a stupid person, just technologically ignorant) how to resample images.

My question is:

Is MSPaint the biggest idiot proof thing out there?

also not looking for some 3rd party ghetto software.

Mr Bacon · Post by **Mr Bacon** » February 7, 2005, 5:34 pm

Stab them.

Voronwë · Post by **Voronwë** » February 7, 2005, 5:35 pm

believe me, it has crossed my mind.

Aabidano · Post by **Aabidano** » February 7, 2005, 5:52 pm

We do screen grabs to put in some of the documentation my group does. One guy was pasting them straight into Word\Publisher as bmp. I asked him to paste them on his desktop as an interim step, open them in Photo Editor, save as jpg and then put them in. Used the rationale that he was killing Outlook everytime he sent me a doc, and we didn't have the disk space to store them on the server.

If it's something that needs to be sent out repeatedly, like a newsletter or bulletin I've explained the net cost of their bitmaps to them across the whole org.

MS Photo Editor should be available on most office PCs and lets you save as jpg. The best Paint Brush can do is gif and it messes up the colors sometimes.

I've run the numbers on how much money we could save per month by allowing only plain text emails. It was pretty impressive when we had 130k employees, not trivial now at 25k employees.

Winnow · Post by **Winnow** » February 7, 2005, 6:15 pm

Something like this that automatically saves print screens as jpegs might be best:

http://www.batchconverter.com/QuickScre ... 7540.shtml

This one's free:

http://www.wisdom-soft.com/products/scr ... r_free.htm

Lynks · Post by **Lynks** » February 7, 2005, 7:29 pm

Write a memo explaining how you can shrink image sizes to jpeg and send it to everyone in the office. Everytime he doesn't do it, go down and ask him if he received the memo until it finally sinks in.

Just keep the memo short in point form with simple instructions.

Voronwë · Post by **Voronwë** » February 8, 2005, 12:15 am

i think Aabi found a workable solution.

Its a real challenge to explain this kind of stuff in a professional way to utterly clueless people without coming across as condescending =)

Aabidano · Post by **Aabidano** » February 8, 2005, 10:16 am

Voronwë wrote:Its a real challenge to explain this kind of stuff in a professional way to utterly clueless people without coming across as condescending

After I tell them once I resort to abuse and\or sarcasm

Llaffer · Post by **Llaffer** » February 8, 2005, 11:54 am

I have a few people who do the same thing at my work. except they take a screen shot of an 80x25 terminal emulator in FULL SCREEN mode as a BMP.

3M file for something that could have been turned to a 400x250ish window first -- even still as a BMP, isn't too bad.

Another guy on my team will take a screen shot of a small window, but still paste his entire desktop instead of just the window we care about.

Fash · Post by **Fash** » February 8, 2005, 12:15 pm

quite important to tell them to use alt-prtscrn for capturing only the active window.

i like ACDSee Classic, as a very fast, efficient image viewer with save-as-jpeg ability.

Sionistic · Post by **Sionistic** » February 8, 2005, 1:54 pm

Lynks wrote:Write a memo explaining how you can shrink image sizes to jpeg and send it to everyone in the office. Everytime he doesn't do it, go down and ask him if he received the memo until it finally sinks in.

Just keep the memo short in point form with simple instructions.

make sure he gets an additional copy of the memo from no less than 4 different bosses of his

Winnow · Post by **Winnow** » February 8, 2005, 2:56 pm

Fash wrote:quite important to tell them to use alt-prtscrn for capturing only the active window.

i like ACDSee Classic, as a very fast, efficient image viewer with save-as-jpeg ability.

yep, ACDSee Classic (2.43 or.44 I think) is the fastest image viewer out there. The later versions of ACDSee are bloated. With ACDSee Classic you can turbo through pictures as fast as you can click the button...even faster if you hold it down. Page Up/Page Down, Home, End, Cntl-F to toggle fullscreen...what else do you need for quick viewing of a series of picts? Nada!

I use it for all my image viewing except for comics. MS Digital Image Pro is a nice program for quick modifications on pictures like resizing, magic erase, red eye, etc. It has quite a few features but is easier to use than Photoshop, etc.

Tenuvil · Post by **Tenuvil** » February 8, 2005, 3:28 pm

Sionistic wrote:
Lynks wrote:Write a memo explaining how you can shrink image sizes to jpeg and send it to everyone in the office. Everytime he doesn't do it, go down and ask him if he received the memo until it finally sinks in.

Just keep the memo short in point form with simple instructions.
make sure he gets an additional copy of the memo from no less than 4 different bosses of his

Peter, did you get the memo on this? I'll just go ahead and send another copy to you mmmk? Great...

Bubba Grizz · Post by **Bubba Grizz** » February 8, 2005, 4:33 pm

Yeah I use photoshop here but that is too powerful for you standard user in the office. I like the mspaint idea. You could also teach them to use the alt-print screen to capture just that window they need. I gave up long ago trying to explain this stuff to people at work because they forget an hour after talking to them.