Optimal Size for Background Images

[funkleberry]

Would someone be able to give us the exact optimal size for a backround image? If the image is too small, it will be stretched and the aspect ratio becomes distorted. If the image files are to large, a slower computer really bogs down when trying to manage these files. I suppose trial and error are a good teacher, but perhaps someone has already been there and we could benefit from their experience

[Williamting]

I am not an expert on JPG but if someone out there can chip in to offer some interesting insight to this topic would be nice. I am also interested to know more.

There are two questions raised by you: 1. Aspect ratio 2: Image size

1. Aspect ration is normally 4:3 (800x600) for normal graphic card. You can find this out from your display properties under the "Setting" tab.

2. Image size varies depending on the level of compression, "complexity", etc. This means that even though you have a picture of 800x600 pixel, your picture size could be 100's of Kbytes or Mbytes.

What I normally do is that I would first check the size of the image. If it is more than 100Kbytes, I would try to "compress" it down and view the image for acceptable quality. If much qualilty is lost, I will either classify it unacceptale, or KIV or just remove it. The image size chosen is very personal because it depends on your CPU speed, your patience, etc. My projection PC is a 2GHz/256Mb RAM Celeron and it has no problem handling images of much larger in size. But my own notebook is much slower and the response is acceptable for image size of about 30-40Kbytes. Perhaps you would like to do some experiments and post here again of your finding.

You can compress by using the Kodak Image software (or probably some other standard graphic software bundled with Windows other than MSPaint). Just open the JPG file and then File>Save As (use a new file name) and select JPG as the output format.