Pictures taken with cameras that take these huge four, six and eight megapixel images are way too big to email or use on a web site? The problem is that your images are physically too large to use.

You’ll need a program to make them smaller. Photoshop CS or Photoshop Elements will do the job just fine. First you need to open the photo in your software and bring up the image resizing option – in Photoshop CS  you’ll choose Image, Image Size. The numbers you see at the top for the width and height are the current dimensions. As a rough guide, a common computer monitor’s resolution is 1280 x 1024 pixels and you probably have at least double that. A good size photo for a web site is around 600 pixels along its longest size. Click the Resample Image checkbox and the Constrain Proportions checkboxes and set the largest of the Width or Height values to 600 pixels (the other setting will alter automatically). Click Ok to resize the image. If it seems very small, use the zoom tool to enlarge it until the title bar says it is 100% size. That’s how big it is now.

Choose File, Save for Web, choose JPEG as the format and experiment with various compression values until you get a good compromise between file size and quality. You should be able to reduce each image to less than 30k in size this way.

Remember never to use the Save command by itself or you may end up overwriting (losing) your original picture.