Hi All,

New to Linux, still trying to see what I can get done with it.

I have recently scanned about 400 old family slides. I would like to compress some to email. Fairly easy task with PhotoShop, even XP.

I can not see how to do this using GIMP.

I am not now looking for a way to manipulate the image, just make it a reasonable size to email.

Any suggestions?

Thanks for any help.

How do you mean "compress to email"?
This sounds like a faux featurette which hides what it is actually doing. I would guess that it is scaling down the compression quality to minimise the byte-size.

For eg. If you save to png or jpg in GIMP, you can select the compression quality. The lower the quality, the better the compression. You also get smaller images by using fewer colors, lower resolution, and scaling them down.

png and jpg are already compressed... the compression is pretty good so you don't actually gain anything by archiving the for eg.

For eg. If you save to png or jpg in GIMP, you can select the compression quality. The lower the quality, the better the compression.

That is exactly what I want to do, just lower the quality/file size to make it manageable for emailing.

Thanks for the help. I was not going far enough in the process. I had to name the file, then click "save", and then I get the quality option. Exactly what I was looking for.

I got bailed out once again. I am new, and have already lost count of the times I have gotten the solution here!

I think you are talking about scaling or "downsampling"---ie you want to reduce the resolution to make a smaller file.

GIMP does this (Image --> Scale Image)

The power tool is Image Magick-- a set of really powerful command line utilities. Here is one example:
This downsamples pic.jpg by 4X in each dimension and saves it as smpic.jpg. e.g. if the image was 1600 X 1200 it will be 400 X 300

Has anyone tried Google Picasa for Linux ??

You bet I do. Works like a charm. No easier way to send photos as far as I'm concerned.

Yea, I'll have to keep trying. Changing the quality setting in GIMP does not accomplish it, I end up with an unusable image that is still too large to email.

I installed picasa, so I'll have a look at it.

I am one of the new guys that has not done much with the command line, but that will be fun to try also.

Thanks for the replies, I will keep at it.

mhg... what you want to do is use photoshop to "export to email" but keep the result. Then compare it to the original. Chances are the process does more than select image quality.

eg. I have a 1.4MiB jpg image. This is 1547x2048. About 50x72cm at 72dpi.
For email, I scale the image so it is 512px high at 72dpi. This is about the size of the prints we used to get from kodak. Now it is only 71kB... and I kept the default 85% quality. That is a sendable size!