Working with Small Photos

I'm not a Facebook fan.  There are so many things I don't like about it, I can't even tell you.

Facebook, however, is not the only platform out there that encourages uploading of small photos to share electronically.  Sharing online is a great idea to a degree.  The problem becomes when we rely solely on these methods of capturing and sharing photos.  Where will these pictures be in 5 years, 10 years or longer?  Actually I can't find anything online from 5 weeks ago most of the time.

These photos are usually very small files.  This is great for displaying on a screen but lousy for printing.  And printed photos are truly the only way you will keep your photos long term.  Websites will come and go or at least change.  Electronic storage becomes dated.  My last computer couldn't read the CD's made on the one before it.

A hard copy of your photos last and that is where we scrapbookers have the advantage.  I'm not advocating only printing images and not having electronic backups.  I think we need to do both but I think we need to be sure we print important photos at a good size for viewing.  The challenge becomes when the sources of your photos only share the tiny little files from on-line.

I was delighted to get these pictures of the little guy's first fishing trip in my inbox until I downloaded them and saw how small they were.  They had been shared on Facebook. I printed them at 300 dpi, you can go as low as 200 and usually be OK but I couldn't print anything decent at 4x6 inches.  So I did print one of them larger but used a semi-transparent version of it for the journaling and title area.  You can't see how pixelated it is that way.

The video shares how to do that in Photoshop Elements.  If you don't have that software, the video picks up about 8 1/2 minutes in with the rest of the layout including the cute little fish cut on the Silhouette and then dressed up with some markers.

Watch at YouTube



Here's the sketch.

So that is my rant for the day - have electronic backups but do print out favorite photos at a good resolution.  Thanks for stopping by!