Help with photo sizes

We love to see your images of Westonbirt in our Gallery. However, our file size limit is 3MB per photograph. If you are having trouble uploading images to our Gallery, this may be because your image exceeds this limit.

Here are some tips on how to use standard PC software to reduce the file size of your images so that they are accepted by our Gallery. This will enable you to create a small copy of your image whilst preserving the original.

You can click on the images to the right to see detailed images of how these simple steps should look on screen.

1. Open the image using Microsoft Office Picture Manager. You can either do this by opening the Picture Manager programme from the Programmes list in the Start menu and opening the image from within the programme, or, as illustrated, by finding the image that you want to submit, right clicking on it, choosing 'Open With' and selecting Microsoft Office Picture Manager.

2. The image will open up in Picture Manager. Press the Edit Pictures button above the image to start the process of making the image file size smaller.

3. Once you've pressed Edit Pictures a menu will appear on the right hand side of the screen. Select Compress Pictures. This usually appears at the bottom of the list.

4. When you've pressed Compress Pictures, a list of options will appear. Choose Compress for Documents from this list, and press the OK button.

5. Your image is now resized to below 1MB. All you need to do now is save it as a new image. To do this, go to the File menu in the top left hand corner and choose Save As... (not Save, or you will overwrite the original high quality image).

6. Make sure that when you save the image, you enter a new file name, otherwise you'll overwrite and lose the original high quality image.

7. You have now saved a smaller version of your image. You can now shut Picture Editor (click No if it asks if you want to save any further changes or you'll lose your original image) and carry on uploading the new small version to our Gallery.

 

Alternative ways to resize...

If you find you do not have this programme on your computer, there are a number of free online tools that you can use, such as Pixlr.

The basics: when on the Pixlr website, just choose 'Open an image from computer' and find the file. You can then rotate the image if necessary buy clicking on the Image menu and rotating as appropriate.
 
Then choose 'File' and 'Save'. Try setting the quality to 50% to maintain image quality but cut the size down. When you press the 'OK' button you'll have an opportunity to rename the file and thereby preserve the original high quality image as well.

You may need to do a few test runs to get below the 3MB limit for our gallery whilst maintaining a level of quality you are happy with.

 

We hope you find these tips useful, but should you experience problems, do let us know using the contact form and we will do our best to assist you. 

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