Image Resolution in iPhoto

[ZAPBoston]

Hi all,

I searched the forums prior to posting just to make sure no one else had asked a similar question. Recently, I had my parents' old 35mm slides digitized online. The company did a great job with the conversion which they say on the website involves a "Nikon film scanner producing the highest quality images at 4000dpi (4000ppi) in the market".

The only problem is each 35mm slide became 12-14 megabyte sized jpeg. I had hundreds of slides digitized. If I want to load them all into iPhoto, it will take up many gigabytes of storage. I like having the high resolution files on the back-up DVD the company sent me, but was wondering if there was any way when importing into iPhoto to have the application downgrade the resolution for me so I can fit more photos into less space. If not iPhoto, maybe Aperture could do it (?)

If anyone has had a similar experience, I would love to hear about it

Many thanks,

Zapboston
Macbook Pro User

 

[Father Jack]

You could use Photoshop to set up an "Action" to resize the images and change the resolution. Then use "Batch" to automatically change as many as you want.

FJ

 

[Super Macho Man]

I would also suggest reconsidering your position on that... HD space is cheap, and if something should happen to the DVD, which is not that unlikely at all, you would have another copy on your HD. Of course having the originals in iPhoto would allow you to view/print them at full resolution too.

Why not downgrade all your iTunes music to 64 Kbps at the same time. Sure it will sound worse, but it will take up less space...

 

[Abstract]

I'd rather have backups of my photos on CD rather than DVD. CDs are a lot more robust.

Anyway, just move these 12-14 MB files onto the Desktop or a convenient location, and use Automator to automatically downgrade the resolution. I used to use one whenever I needed to upload a photo to the Picture Of The Day thread. I'd drag the photo out of iPhoto and onto my Desktop, but I had to batch resize sometimes.

This is the easiest way, I think.

 

[-hh]

Hi all,

I searched the forums prior to posting just to make sure no one else had asked a similar question. Recently, I had my parents' old 35mm slides digitized online. The company did a great job with the conversion which they say on the website involves a "Nikon film scanner producing the highest quality images at 4000dpi (4000ppi) in the market".

If my math doesn't fail me, 4000dpi should have produced a tad less than a 6000 x 4000 (24 MP) image size. Is this about what they delivered?

The only problem is each 35mm slide became 12-14 megabyte sized jpeg. I had hundreds of slides digitized.

If the scan size was 20+MP, at only 12-14MB per image, the file format used probably has significant compression. What's the format? JPEG? TIFF?

If I want to load them all into iPhoto, it will take up many gigabytes of storage. I like having the high resolution files on the back-up DVD the company sent me, but was wondering if there was any way when importing into iPhoto to have the application downgrade the resolution for me so I can fit more photos into less space.

Personally, I don't trust optical (DVD or CD) as a permanent storage media. An external hard drive is fairly inexpensive and a desktop system's main HD is pretty cheap per GB, so that's a straightforward way to have redundent backups.

From there, a batch action can be set up in many applications, such as Photoshop, to make a downscaled copy of the original; this would then be what you import into iPhoto if you're really concerned about size. However, do keep in mind that 1000 images at 12MB each is only 12GB of storage used, which by today's standards isn't all that huge anymore when you consider that iPhoto can handle RAW files and for an 8MP camera these are roughly 12MB in size each too.

BTW, I'm curious about the price that they charged and who they were (offline is fine). Reason being is that I have around 10,000 undigitized images gathering dust that I'm probably never going to have the free time to hand scan.


-hh

 

[ZAPBoston]

Thanks everyone for the help, I really appreciate it

Zapboston