Odd Gorham container...?

[dognose]

Hi GABatGH,

Yes, please share these details with us.

Trev.

[GABatGH]

For those not tech savvy, this is probably going to scare you a little. Please don't be. I truly have a knack for teaching how to use computers to people who think they can't use them.

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Like I said, I'd be happy to share my knowledge.

You should know, right now I'm using Windows 10. I did this with Windows 7. I did this with Windows Vista. I did this with Windows 98, 95, and XP. Granted back then we didn't have Google, but what I do with Windows Paint now I've been doing for almost twenty years.

On a busy day, I'll work on a few dozen items, taking and manipulating hundreds of pictures. What I do will take a lot longer to explain than it does to do. Do NOT get scared of it. If you were to watch me you would laugh to see how simple it really is. My six year old daughter is starting to help me with the cropping of the pictures so I don't have to sit at my desk so much.

I take pictures with my Samsung Galaxy Note 4. The pictures get automatically uploaded to Google Photos.

In Chrome at Google Photos, I will crop the pictures, rotate them as necessary, light correct as needed. Then I will download them.

Once they're on my hard drive, I will open them in Paint, all the photos for each item at a time.

Yes, Paint. I never learned how to use Photoshop. I read the books, watched the video courses. I just couldn't *get* it. Too complicated. I never could even grasp how to get a layer to work.

In Paint I would combine all the pictures of the item into one picture. For instance, lets say it was a coin. There would be two pictures, front and back. I would make the front picture twice as wide, then I would copy the back picture and paste it into the front picture and place it next to the front. Then the front would be on the left and the back would be on the right. This gets a little hairy with four or five pictures for one item but I make it work.

Then, still in Paint, go to the Resize menu. At the top there is Percentage and Pixels. Switch to Pixels and it tells you exactly how big your image is in pixels. On my web hosting I keep my max file size at 1000 pixels, so I'll take the largest number and change it to 1000. In the example of the coin, that would probably be horizontal. If you took a picture of a vase standing up, then it would probably be vertical. Click ok, and save.

Now save the file.

Doing what you just read would take me about ten seconds to actually do. If you're following my directions for the first time it should take you less than a minute.

Now, for multiple pictures.... that's a little different.

This took me a long time to figure out. You must have Photo Gallery. I do not know if everyone has Photo Gallery.

The easiest way to know if you have Photo Gallery is to right click a photo and select Open With and see if Photo Gallery is in there.

In Windows Explorer, go to the folder where you have multiple pictures to change. If they're mixed in with other files, I strongly recommend making a new folder, just for this task. Right click one of those pictures and Open with Photo Gallery. Select Edit, organize, or share.

You'll get a completely different window that looks more like Windows Explorer. I wish I know how to get to this window another way. I've been searching on and off for a few years.

Select all the pictures you want to resize. Right click one of the selected pictures and Resize is one of the options.

My program makes a copy of all the pictures with the new size, in pixels, in the title. You will then have to manually change each photo to get rid of those numbers but that's sure a lot less work than changing the pixel size manually in Paint.

That said, I even have a program that can bulk name change too. So after I change all the names, I pop into that program and I remove all those pixel sizes from all the files all at once.

Please do NOT hesitate to try this. Take some pictures that you have, make copies of them, and play with them!!!!

If the copies get messed up just delete them and you've lost nothing but gained experience.

If there's any step that is causing confusion, tell me!

[dognose]

Hi GABatGH,

Many thanks for the effort you have put into this project. To be honest, I'd never even noticed the pixel indicator in the Paint programme and today I've learnt something, thanks for that.

But have I got it right? To achieve my desired 7" (18cm) width limit for my image, the pixel indicator informs me that it is 640 pixels horizontal, does that sound correct, and does that mean that setting to 640 pixels horizontal every time gives me the perfect width for everyone to see the whole image?

Apologies to all for taking the subject way off topic, we've come a long way from a Gorham oil chrism.

Trev.

[GABatGH]

So I went digging online for a pixel to inch calculator. It took a while but I did eventually find one here. http://tiporama.com/tools/pixels_inches.html

Here is your problem, which is what I explained earlier.

On a 75dpi display, 525x525 pixels is a seven inch square picture.

On a 120dpi display, 672x672 pixels is a seven inch square picture.

Different dpi, different resolution, different size. Now you can add dozens of cell phone and tablet varieties to the mix and who knows what the dpi of the screen might be.

If being a "bandwidth hog" is the concern, then the cap should be on file size not image size. File compression has come a long way in twelve years. Have the system make the cap on images a certain megabyte or kilobyte.

Or, you can set your system to do what that other forum did, and max the image capacity at a specific number, where there's was 1500 x 1100, you could simply set yours to the atypical 640x480.

[GABatGH]

...and as for being off topic, I'm guessing you'll eventually move the photo editing part to its own thread for people to see.

[dognose]

This is all very good information and very much appreciated.

Thank you.

Trev.