Before we get into why you’d want to resize your pictures, let’s talk about what image size actually is. Digital images produced by cameras and smartphones consist of pixels. In the world of photography, resolution is the number of pixels an image contains. Naturally, the higher the resolution the better the quality of a photo. But at the same time, if your image contains a lot of pixels, its file size will also be quite large; in case you don’t know what a file size is, it’s the amount of bytes your file takes up in your device’s memory.
Let’s start with some basics. Any file, including an image, has a size. A file size is measured in megabytes and kilobytes. There are 1024 kilobytes in 1 megabyte. A size of an image depends on various factors: pixel dimensions, quality, details, and format.
The PNG (Portable Network Graphics) format was developed to replace the outdated GIF format in the late 1990s. The main goal of its developers was to create a format that provides lossless compression, supports transparency and produces images with a wider range of colors than GIF.
GIF (Graphics Interchange Format) is a file format that can display animation; although, unlike videos, it doesn’t have any sound. It’s a raster format which allows multiple images to be combined in one file. Plus, there’s some information about how long each image should be displayed for. Animated GIFs work similarly to a flipbook – they contain a series of related images. When their sequence is played, they create an effect of a video. Except there’s no sound, and they tend to be of a quite low resolution.
JPEG (Joint Photographic Experts Group) is a raster file format, which utilizes compression to store data. It was developed by a group of photography experts, hence its name. JPG is one of the most common and widely used formats for storing and sharing photos and other kinds of images. This format is all over the place in digital photography, web graphics, social media and print media, and for all image editing and manipulation.
Lina Thorne • Updated · Posted in Resize Photo
