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Your Photos: Quality for what Purpose? Part 2

Last week I mentioned that many amateur photographers (like myself) take higher-resolution photos than they really need. Today I will consider the quality needed for your online Trip Journal.

As explained recently by John Vermilye in this blog, computer monitors are not capable of displaying pictures with anywhere near the detail that can be seen on photo paper.

Loading times and ‘pre-optimization’

You’ve likely noticed that some photos load much faster than others on your computer screen. This can be due to a number of factors including your internet connection speed, the size of your image, and its resolution. High-res photos can take much longer to load than low-res ones, especially if your connection speed is slow.

Since you can’t see high resolution on a computer screen, there’s usually no point in sitting around and waiting for it to load. That’s why many photos are ‘pre-optimized’ for the internet when they’re received in the first place; ‘pre-optimization’ being a euphemism for stripping out much of the quality to make a fast-loading photo that will still look good on a computer screen.

If you use the MyTripJournal system, your photos will be automatically pre-optimized for the internet at the moment you load them to our servers. The file size will be reduced to somewhere in the vicinity of 50K for fast-loading purposes. Here’s a beautiful photo published in our Sept. 2006 newsletter , posted by Tom Barker in his Trip Journal ‘Our Trip to Alaska‘:

“Can You Imagine Scaling This?”


Here’s the original size of this photo, loaded on the internet from the high-res version. Aside from being larger, can you see the difference in quality? Probably not, since you cannot see more than your computer screen can show you.

Access by Trip Journalers to their original quality photos

Premium Trip Journal subscribers have the ability to access their original quality photos, in several ways:

Lest you be concerned about privacy, there is yet another option. Premium subscribers who don’t want the general public access to their high quality photos, can also choose the ‘privacy’ option (‘Trip Journal Options’) requiring a visitor-access password before anyone can access any of your original resolution photos.

Next week I’ll finish up this series by summarizing what this all means to you!

Dan Parlow

Personal Travel Websites by RV.Net ; Online Travel Journals by MyTripJournal.com ; Explore Good Sam Club Trip Journals ; Woodalls Trip Journals ; Travel Journals by Trailer Life Directory ; Traveling USA Travel Blogs

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