I am a rather late convert from PC to Mac, so I keep discovering something new (maybe not so new for my geeky colleagues ☺) every day.   Today I found something that I felt it would be a sin not to share.

For a long time, I have been figuring out a good way to send photos home to family and friends in China.  I may be too fancy, but I tried Web Shots and flickr to share photos with them, but for one reason or another, these sites were either blocked in China or require some sort of authentication that may be challenging for some as the instructions are in English.   And most of them don’t use Facebook either.   So to make lives either, I have gone back to the old-fashioned way to send photos: by attaching them to emails.

However, I found some photos are too large to send by email (some as large as 2M, because I forgot to configure my camera or chose not to), so emailing such photos would annoy people tremendously.    If you just want to share some photos for people to view on the computer, you really don’t need to send a 2 MB photo.  Yet you may select such resolution any way because you want to use it for some other purposes that require high quality of image.  So how to resize and re-purpose these high-quality images?   I used to go to some web sites, which offer resizing services, but this would require you to upload photos, resize, and then download, etc.  It’s painful.

I discovered that with iPhoto on Mac, this problem can be solved fairly easily.   For those who use Mac email, you will notice that you can select the size of attached photos when you attach them.  Mac email will then resize it for you automatically.  If you don’t use the Mac email, here are some simple steps in resizing your photos before attaching  them to your email.

Here are some simple steps:

1.    Launch iPhoto;

2.    Find the Photo you want to resize.  You can find them from “events”, if you have organized your imports into events, or you can search for them from your “last import” or “last 12 months” options;

3.    Select the photos (Holding down “shift” to select whole rows or columns, or “command” to select multiple photos one after another)

4.    Click on “file”

5.    Click on “export”;

6.    Select “file export”;

7.    Choose your configuration here, for instance you could select “JPEG” for file “kind”, and “medium” for “quality”;

8.    Here is the important part:  for file size, select “medium”, which would drastically reduce your file size;

9.    For file name, choose one of the options.  I usually select “sequential”, and give it a prefix, such as “graduation” for prefix.  Your photos will then be named graduation01, graduation 02,  etc.

10.    Click on “export”;

11.    Select the place to export the new files to, or simply make a new folder for this new group of photos.  Then click on “OK” to finish.

I found, much to my surprise, that the size was reduced from something like 2MB to 100k.   I then emailed these photos to myself to see if the quality was compromised as much.  To my surprise, the quality of photos was very identical.  Yet what a world a difference there is, between 10 MB  and 600 KB of attachments!