Smugmug - Filesize Limitations

[ericreagan]

Smugmug says its file size limitations are 8MB. I signed up for a trial account

and have a little problem with this limitation due to my workflow. Unless I can

come up with a simple fix (read: fast and retaining quality), it's gonna be a

deal breaker for me. I'd like to use smugmug's entry level account for family

and friends photo sharing. I'm not a pro and never will be. I'm really

interested on what the helpful community here has to say. :)

<p>

Below, see the email message I sent to smugmug (I'll let you know what they say

as soon as I hear from them):

<p><i>

I see, now that I've opened an account that file sizes are limited to 8MB. I

shoot with a Canon Rebel XT in RAW and do my post-processing in Adobe Lightroom

Beta 2. When finished and ready to print or place online, I export to JPEG in

sRGB color space. This produces files sized 6-10MB in JPG format. I'm happy

with my workflow and don't really want to change it. I'd really like to give

smugmug a shot but I'm not ready to make drastic changes to my workflow. Do you

have any suggestions on a simple fix for the file size (to keep under 8MB)? I

don't want the quality to suffer, nor am I ready to shell out $150 for the pro

account.</i>

<p>

Regards,

<p>

Eric Reagan

[peter_daalder]

<i>I'd like to use smugmug's entry level account for family and friends photo sharing.</i><p>Hi Eric.<br> I'm not familiar with the Adobe Lightroom Beta 2 software. When you go to export your 6-10Mb jpegs, is there an option to control the quality of the file? Photoshop allows you to choose the jpeg quality level between 0-12. If, like you have stated above, you're only using smugmug for photo sharing, why not save (export) jpegs of a slightly lower quality (8Mb) into a special smugmug folder on your hard drive and then post them on their web site.<br>I hardly ever "share" any images of mine with friends and family, that are larger than 1024x768 and perhaps 400kb in file size. <br>Obviously, all your interested friends and family have fast internet connections?

[ericreagan]

Peter,

 

Thanks for the response. I'm also interested in using the printing services on smugmug too. I've been sending out emails from portfolios that I upload to myphotopipe.com but they only stay on there for a month or two before deleted. I thought about your suggestion of dropping the quality, but I'm not sure how that's gonna affect prints.

 

I'd appreciate any info from folks on what the slider adjustments affects on files actually are.

 

Additionally, toying around with a file and the slider has opened a whole new can of worms I hope someone can explain to me. Lightroom has a slider similar to Photoshop, except it goes from 0-100. Here's the file sizes of one file:

 

Full quality JPEG export from Lightroom (from RAW) = 9.2MB

Full quality JPEG export from Photoshop (from TIFF) = 5.3MB

90 of 100 quality JPEG export from Lightroom (from RAW) = 2.9MB

 

I suspect that the difference in the full quality export from Lightroom and Photoshop has to do with the use of the TIFF or RAW format.

 

Can someone just help me get my bearings straight on what's going on in the export process and how the slider affects quality?

 

Thanks,

 

Eric

[ericreagan]

To follow up that last post,

 

With a 99 out of 100 on the slider the same file exported to JPEG results in a 3.3MB file.

 

99 vs. 100 seems negligible until I compare the respective files sizes of 3.3 vs. 9.2. What's lost in that 6MB?

 

My curiousity has certainly been piqued and this is becoming more of an academic inquiry than anything else.

[jimstrutz]

The way to tell the difference would be to save an image at 100, and again at 99 (or even 90), and then open them up in Photoshop (or watever) and compare them at 100%. If you can't see the difference there, make two 8x12" prints and look real close. My experience is, you won't be able to tell the difference, or if you can, it will be a small amount of JPG artifacts surrounding some fine detail. At some compression level you will be able to see it on screen and in print, but you probably won't see it at 99, and may not see it at 90.

 

Where you usually get into trouble with JPG's is when you save a file, open it up and modify it, save that, then open it up to change and save it again. Repeated use of JPG compression is not good, but for just making a file for printing you can compress them quite a bit without noticable quality loss.