Preparing photos: they're huge!

It's a shock the first time you display photos from your digital camera and discover they're probably enormous.

SmugMug allows you to upload any photo unless it exceeds the definition of enormous: 8 megabytes for standard and power users, 16 for pros — and up to 48 megapixels for all users. We make resized display copies for a great viewing experience. However, you may be shocked at how long it takes to upload them.

What can I do?

Most cameras allow you to choose Small, Medium, or Large photos. They will tell you the number of pixels that represent the photo, such as 1280 X 960. What size should you choose?

With megapixels being the #1 way manufacturers market cameras, it may shock you to learn that in the last 1,000,000 prints SmugMug has shipped, we have only seen two prints returned for too few megapixels (they both had 0.2 megapixels).

A good rule of thumb is you need 100 pixels per inch of print on continous-tone printers like our lab uses to produce excellent results. For an 8x10 print, that's 800x1000 pixels, or 0.8 megapixels. Many incredible enlargements you see on display from top professionals are 100 pixels per inch.

More about resolution.

Your camera also allows you to choose fine or medium quality. It seems so obvious that fine is fine and medium is medium...who would want to compromise?

Fine and medium refer to compression level. We have never seen a print returned for compression level, nor the person who could tell the difference between prints made from medium versus fine in blind tests. But medium are half the size, byte-wise. Here is a shot taken on medium.

SmugMug shoots the award-winning cars at Pebble Beach Concours d'Elegance and uses the medium setting for prints up to 30x40 inches, displayed by the wealthy and prominent. We have taken the enlargements to photography user groups, who say the print quality is stunning.

If it sounds like we're careless about print quality, we're actually fanatically fussy. But the lesson of a million prints is that quality comes from color, contrast, exposure and noise from the ISO setting of the camera. More about those.

It may sound scary...but it's actually great fun and very satisfying to install a simple photo editing program like Photoshop Elements. (Full Photoshop is expensive and for power users; Photoshop Elements is the simple, inexpensive version). An alternative, free but powerful solution is to download irfanview.

These programs can turn your 1,000-kilobyte files into 70-kilobyte files, making them upload 14 times faster.

You can pick image resize and set the maximum number of pixels on a side to 1500 if you plan to make enlargements up to 10x15 inches. After you resize, save them as .jpg files, and choose quality 8, 9, or 10.

Check out this help page for the run-down on your options for saving jpegs.