Picture types - Shelli help! / General / Teddy Talk: Creating, Collecting, Connecting

Newcastle, Ontario
Posts: 5,643

thumperantiques May 12, 2006

Yesterday, my I had my niece and Deb Burnham for tea. My niece took some pics with her Kodak Easy share camera. I absolutely hate having my picture taken, but since one of them was the least objectionable one I've seen for quite a while, I decided to upload it. Well, after spending over two hours trying to get it to the right size, it wouldn't load as it says it's the wrong kind of picture. I finally figured out it's a bmp and TT says it has to be a gif, jpeg or png? I want to know what the heck the differences are. My own camera is a Kodak easy share and I've never had a problem loading pics on TTalk. So girls, at least I tried - I was so ticked off I deleted the picture completely from my computer. After all the hassle, I don't think I could have looked at it anyway.
hugs,

Brenda

Fred-i-Bear
Johannesburg
Posts: 2,243
Website

fredbear May 12, 2006

Oh Brenda, you have me as curios as can be to see you now, I will have to just get myself over to Canada and visit you !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Loading pictures and me are also not the best of friends, sometimes they work , othertimes I sit here and battle like mad, the experts will have to give you a hand.

bear_original
Lynette

Newcastle, Ontario
Posts: 5,643

thumperantiques May 12, 2006

Hi Lynette,
You might have a long wait - this picture stuff is soooooo frustrating. I've never had this problem before. The picture came through Hotmail and I looked at another photo in another email at Hotmail and it will only allow me to save it as a "bmp" . I'm wondering if I ask her to send it to my other email address at Google mail, maybe there are other optiions for saving it in a different format? I'm hoping maybe Shelli can help me.

hugs,

Brenda

Sunnie Bears
Ridgecrest, CA
Posts: 1,167

SunnieOne May 12, 2006

If you have a photo editting program, it should give you the option to open it in the photo program and select "save as" and select jpeg or jpg as the type.
Sonya

Newcastle, Ontario
Posts: 5,643

thumperantiques May 12, 2006

OMG Sonya, I can't believe I'm so stupid. I just checked my Corel program - I never realized that you could change the format when saving it in the photo program!!!!!!! I've never noticed the different formats before. bear_rolleyes Now I want my photo back!! I'll have to have my niece send it again. Thank you soooooo much.

hugs,

Brenda

Doodlebears
UK
Posts: 7,414

doodlebears Celebration AmbassadorMay 12, 2006

Brenda I do hope you get the picture again from your neice, it would be lovely to see you. bear_thumb

Hugs Jane. bear_flower

Baird'sBears
Toronto
Posts: 3,873

Eileen May 12, 2006

bear_original Don't feel bad, Brenda--I just discovered this myself about 2 weeks ago, and I've already deleted lots of pix I didn't think I could save! ACK :doh:

Eileen

Sunnie Bears
Ridgecrest, CA
Posts: 1,167

SunnieOne May 12, 2006

Brenda, you are not stupid. Sometimes it just takes a little nudge from someone to get you brain kick started.. lol wink
Sonya

SHELLI MAKES
Chico, California
Posts: 9,939
Website

Shelli Retired Help Advisor, Banner SponsorMay 12, 2006

No, nobody muddling through this stuff is stupid. It's actually pretty complicated and there is so very MUCH to learn.

Sonya was right; your photo editing program should have a feature that allows you to SAVE AS. Generally, you'll find this as part of a drop-down menu under the FILE title on your toolbar.

If you just click the SAVE option, your program will save the active file with the same name, and as the same file type, with which it was opened.

If you click the SAVE AS option, your program will allow you to select the file type, and rename the file if you so choose.

Some options for saving images, in terms of file type, include:

.jpg (a.k.a. .jpeg)
.gif
.png
.psd
.pdf
.tif
.bmp

and probably a host of other types I'm not personally familiar with.

In general, if you're posting to the web, you want to save your image files as .jpg. That's the most commonly used and accepted format.

Many websites also accept .gif files. Just FYI, many times when you see simple animation -- such as in Penny's Vendor banner or the slideshow of work/art cards on my website -- you're looking at a .gif file. This type of animation is relatively simple to do if you have the correct software/add-on utility to do so.

A more complicated type of animation is FLASH animation. I don't know much about it other than that it allows more sophisticated, higher quality animation, but is a huge learning curve unto itself, so mostly, only people who are web-saturated designer types, providing web services or doing digital animation professionally, tend to use it.

Last, re: your questions on bitmaps... from www.cnet.com:

bitmap

Any picture you see on the Web (or hot off a scanner, or on a page created with a desktop publishing application) is called a bitmap. As its name suggests, a bitmap is a map of dots--similar to what you see when you look at a newspaper photo under a strong magnifying glass--that looks like a picture when viewed from a distance. Bitmaps come in many file formats (GIF, JPEG, TIFF, BMP, PICT, and PCX, to name a few) and can be read by paint programs and image editors such as Adobe Photoshop.

If you zoom in on or try to scale up a bitmap, it will look blocky. Digital pictures that you can easily scale up (such as those created in PostScript, CorelDraw, or CAD formats) are called vector graphics

And re: file TYPE .bmp (also called BITMAP), from www.cnet.com:

BMP
bitmap

BMP was developed by Microsoft and is the native graphics format for Windows users. The images you see when Windows starts up and closes, and the wallpaper that adorns your desktop, are all in BMP format. BMP tends to store graphical data inefficiently, so the files it creates are larger than they need to be. But at least wallpaper file sizes can be reduced using a technique called run-length encoding.

Long story short... a file saved as .bmp is going to be TOO BIG to save to the web. When you choose to SAVE AS .jpg, your software "compresses" the information in your original bitmap image into a more manageable size that the web can handle.

Don't forget to save to a resolution of 72dpi, too, for smallest file size, quickest upload, and highest chance of being accepted anywhere you want to post on the web!

Newcastle, Ontario
Posts: 5,643

thumperantiques May 12, 2006

Thanks Sonya! I do have to learn to click drop menus, just as a general rule, to see what it offers LOL!

Shelli, thanks so much for explaining about the different kinds of formats. It's been a learning experience and one that I won't forget, since I wasted so much time LOL! Oh well, that tends to be the way I learn. I really want to take a photoshop course. I am learning new things all the time, thanks to the generosity of people like you and all the other TT members, but I want to know more. I do find that I enjoy playing with graphics and pictures and it would be nice ro really understand more of it. Thanks again!

Hugs,

Brenda