It’s a requirement for entry into Weekly Photo Competition that all photos must be in jpg format and 1mb or less.
If you have some understanding of this stuff you can cut to the chase ยป
Checking that you meet these requirements
jpg format
There are lots of different digital image formats, like Bitmap (.bmp), GIF (.gif), TIFF (.tiff) and RAW (.raw) to name a few.
The easiest way to check that your photo is a jpg is to look at it’s file extension in your filebrowser. You may need to right-click the file and choose ‘Properties’ or ‘Get Info’ to find out the extension. If the photo is called myphoto.jpg or myphoto.jpeg all’s good. If it has a different extension you may have to open the image in some photo editing software and save a copy as a jpg.
1mb or less
If your photo has come directly from a digital camera it may be 4 or more megabytes in size. This is way bigger than we need to display on Weekly Photo Competition. The easiest way to check the size is to look at the file in your filebrowser. You may need to right-click the file and choose ‘Properties’ or ‘Get Info’ to find out the size. 1mb is 1,000kb.
Editing your images
Large images can be resized, cropped made into jpgs and optimised to decrease their file size using commercial photo editing software like Photoshop (PC and Mac), iPhoto (Mac only) or other graphics software.
PixResizer is a handy free program that will let you resize a whole folder of images at once.
In summary (the chase)
If you’re editing your image for submission to Weekly Photo Competition using editing software we suggest you
- resize your image to 1000 pixels on the larger side of the photo
- save as a medium quality jpg - this should give you a final filesize of around 250-500 kb (which is half of 1mb)
