Multimedia

[fwrightson]

I've just upgraded to 10 and I'd like to add some multimedia to individual cards. I have scanned many, many items over the years (newspaper obits, articles, photos, etc) and they are all in Photoshop format. I can change them to any format that I desire (PDF, JPEG, PNG) and wondered, since I publish my database for my website, if there was a preferred format (I know it won't be the Photoshop PSD format). The PSD scans produced fairly large file sizes - 1.5MB for a small 4 inch newspaper article) and I noticed that when I changed it over to PNG format, the file size didn't reduce. I know that I can make them PDFs and then "optimize" the image in Acrobat Pro and reduce it significantly in size. Does anyone have any thoughts on this?

Also, when I added the first article image to an individual card, it appeared in photo area of the individual's card. Therefore, I'm led to believe that I should only put the image I want to display as "the photo image" of the person in the individual section and put all other media in the "family" section. Is this good logic?

Thanks in advance for any thoughts.

[AE Palmer]

Re: Multimedia

Also, when I added the first article image to an individual card, it appeared in photo area of the individual's card. Therefore, I'm led to believe that I should only put the image I want to display as "the photo image" of the person in the individual section and put all other media in the "family" section. Is this good logic?

Not necessarily. Once you have more than one image (in any media block) you can select the one you want to display by clicking the "preferred" flag on the image YOU want.

[Dennis J. Cunniff]

Re: Multimedia

I have scanned many, many items over the years (newspaper obits, articles, photos, etc) and they are all in Photoshop format. I can change them to any format that I desire (PDF, JPEG, PNG) and wondered, since I publish my database for my website, if there was a preferred format (I know it won't be the Photoshop PSD format). The PSD scans produced fairly large file sizes - 1.5MB for a small 4 inch newspaper article) and I noticed that when I changed it over to PNG format, the file size didn't reduce. I know that I can make them PDFs and then "optimize" the image in Acrobat Pro and reduce it significantly in size. Does anyone have any thoughts on this?

This is a complicated question. For the web, there's no point in having a photo resolution greater than 72 dpi, because that's how it's going to be displayed on a computer screen. Also, the smaller the file the better, for speed of downloading. So if the only use for this multimedia were going to be displaying the images on the web, you'd want jpg files with a resolution of 72 dpi (for photos) or png files for graphs and charts.

But if you're ever going to print the images, you will want at least a resolution of 110 to 300 dpi, and higher if you are going to enlarge the image. If you're going to edit the files (as in Photoshop), you should consider tif files, because they can do compression without loss of detail (while jpg compression loses detail each time you alter and re-save the file).

I don't see much reason to consider a pdf file for scanned multimedia images, and I reserve that format for documents. When Acrobat Pro optimizes a file containing only an image, all it's doing is reducing the resolution.

I'm not sure why your psd files are so large; they're essentially jpgs with the ability to store layers. Perhaps you are scanning them at a very high resolution?

It may be worthwhile to have one set of files scanned at full resolution and stored as compressed tif files, and another of lower resolution jpgs for use on the web. But this may also be more trouble than it's worth.

Also, when I added the first article image to an individual card, it appeared in photo area of the individual's card. Therefore, I'm led to believe that I should only put the image I want to display as "the photo image" of the person in the individual section and put all other media in the "family" section. Is this good logic?

You should put multimedia that pertains to the person in the person section; you can choose any one of these as the preferred picture to display.

Anyway, those are my thoughts; others may think otherwise.

[theKiwi]

Re: Multimedia

This is a complicated question. For the web, there's no point in having a photo resolution greater than 72 dpi, because that's how it's going to be displayed on a computer screen. Also, the smaller the file the better, for speed of downloading. So if the only use for this multimedia were going to be displaying the images on the web, you'd want jpg files with a resolution of 72 dpi (for photos) or png files for graphs and charts.

"Resolution" is irrelevant when preparing images for the web, since devices have quite different resolutions - from under 100dpi on computer monitors to over 300dpi on things like iPhone screens.

What is important is the pixel size of the image, so you need to have an idea of the pixel dimensions of the screens that your target audience might be using, and size your images accordingly. For example my 2 displays are each 1920x1080 pixels., so unless I want to allow people to zoom in to my images, making them larger than that means that either they won't fit on the window in one go, or will be shrunk to fit in the window.

For most things - e.g. a census image - a maximum pixel size of 1600 pixels is sufficient to show the necessary detail, while for images of people, 1000 pixels is probable sufficient.

But the resolution - in dpi of those images is completely irrelevant.

Roger

[fwrightson]

Re: Multimedia

Thank you - all - for your replies. They give me the exact direction I need to go. Thanks again.