Tutorials: File Size
A question I often get from other digital camera users is: How do I email pictures from my digital camera?
The answer is quite simple, send it as an attachment. Although there are other things to think about before sending a high quality digital photo via email. Unless you are sending pictures for high quality printing reasons, most people don't need to send or receive really big pictures. This page explains about file sizes and how it affects time and space.

Files from digital cameras are about 500 KB to 1024 KB (1MB) in size. Some newer digital camera's produce pictures that are 2,048 KB (2 MB) At medium quality!

To understand what MB's and KB's mean, read and try to understand the following.

2 KB - 5 KB = Size of a small thumbnail picture on a webpage (Example = 3.16KB or 3248 bytes)
7.36 KB = The size of this text and the small thumbnail picture.
30 KB = Typical size of a 1 page Microsoft Word Document
30 KB - 80 KB = Size of a regular picture on a website Click Here for example (example is 67.4K or 69,079 bytes)
500 KB - 1000 KB = Raw pictures coming from a digital camera Click here for a full Image (example is 791 KB or 810,416 bytes)
2048 KB (2 MB) = Size of a free Hotmail.com email account. This means just a few pictures from a digital camera will fill your friends email account.
This is why resizing pictures for the internet is so important. You don't want your friend mad at you because you filled his email account and he was no longer to receive all his other important e-mail’s until he deleted the 3 jumbo sized pictures you sent him!



Download speed's
4 KB - 7 KB = Speed a 56kB (Kilobit, not Kilobyte) dial up modem downloads during 1 Second.
50 KB - 500 KB = Speed Broadband Internet, Cable or DSL is capable of downloading in 1 Second.

Some simple math:

1 Picture on a website or from an email that has been resized to 50 KB

Dial Up (56k) Users such as AOL and MSN:
@ 5 KB a second it would take about 10 seconds

Broadband users (VERY FAST) Cable and DSL:
@ 50 KB a second it would take about 1 second.


A picture taken using a digital camera with out being resized at 700K:

Dial Up:
@ 5 KB a second it would take about 140 seconds or 2 Minutes 30 seconds.

Broadband:
@ 50 KB a second it would take about 14 seconds.
@ 350 kB a second it would take about 2 seconds.


Broadband users download speed varies so much usually because of the server the user is requesting information from. 50K is slow for broadband but still much faster (10 times) than dial up. 200K - 300K is probably a good average for surfing the internet. (40 - 60 times faster than dial up)
You can see why when people switch to broadband internet they are unwilling switch back to dial up or to even waste their time at a friends house who use's dial up internet access.
Who wants to spend a week driving across the county for a 1 hour meeting when you can fly there in less than a day? Is your time worth something? If you haven't already, you might want to consider switching to broadband if you use the internet for more than just checking email.



Don't try to memorize this stuff. It's pretty boring.

1024 KB (1 MB) = Approximate size of the bible in a text document.
1440K (1.44 MB) = Size of a 3 1/2" floppy disk.
650MB = Size of most CD's or 74 minutes of audio.
1GB (Gigabyte) = 1024 MB's

1 bit = 8 bytes (pretty small)
1 byte is a single character such as A or B or C or 1 or 2 or 3
1,024 bytes = 1 KB (Kilobyte)
1,024 KB (Kilobytes) = 1 MB (Megabyte)
1,024 MB (Megabytes) = 1 GB (Gigabyte) (1.57 CD's)
1 CD = 650 MB (Megabytes) (74 minutes of audio)
1 DVD-R = 4.7 GB. (Single Side Single Layer)
1 DVD = 17 GB (Both sides using both layers)


Back to Tutorials

DerekRowley.com