VisualTour.com™ Contact: J. L. Winn, TRF Systems, Inc.
JLWinn@VisualTour.com 954.345.9701 ext 220

You've just gotten your brand new, multi-megapixel camera and you've taken your first few beautiful high-resolution photos of one of your listings. You download them to your local computer's hard drive, and then you decide to e-mail a few of them to a buyer that you think may be interested. You write the buyer an e-mail message, and you attach the photos from your local disk drive and click "send". You notice that it takes a couple of minutes for the e-mail message to go out on your home DSL connection (or from your high-speed office connection), but you don't think much of it.

A couple of hours later the buyer comes home and dials into his Internet account using his modem and he checks his e-mail. When he starts downloading your e-mail and photo attachments, his Internet connection is tied up for the next 45 minutes. Needless to say he's not real happy with you at this point, and by the time he's downloaded the pictures (assuming he's willing to wait that long) he's so aggravated that he's sending you an e-mail telling you never to send him any more attachments (or anything else for that matter!).

There's no better way to frustrate your customer than to e-mail them one or more full-size digital photos, especially if they have a modem connection to the Internet. With today's digital cameras, high resolution photos can easily be 500 kb or larger, and each photo can take 10 minutes or more to download on a modem connection. Many e-mail accounts have limits on the size of the attachments that they can accept, so your attachments may not go through at all, further frustrating both you and the customer.

How do you avoid this situation and communicate effectively with digital images using e-mail? The answer is simple... resize your image before sending them. Here's how.

After downloading the photos from your digital camera to your local hard drive, use the image editing software that came with your camera to select the photo(s) that you want to send. Open the photo that you want to resize, then select "Resize" from your menu options at the top of the screen. Look around, you'll find it. You may have to select Image - Resize, or Tools - Resize or something similar. The resizing feature may be called "Resample" instead of "Resize". If all else fails, click on the Help option on the menu bar and look for help on resizing images.

Once you've selected the Resize feature, you'll be prompted to enter a size for the photo. Since the purpose of sending images by e-mail isn't for high quality printing, typically I resize them to approximately 300 pixels wide, then let the software figure out the proportional height of the photo. Then, select File - Save As and save it under a meaningful file name and as a JPEG file type (this will usually be the default setting.) When you attach the photo(s) to your e-mail, just make sure you select your new file that you saved and not the original larger version!

By doing this, you can normally reduce the file size of the photo down to approximately 30-50 kb. Many times this is just 1/10 the size (or even smaller) of the original image, and the download time is reduced accordingly for your home buyer. The images are still plenty large enough to include all the detail that your recipient needs to enjoy the photo on their computer screen.

Remember, when you're e-mailing digital photos... Be Wise and Resize!

Steve Jarrell is the CEO of VisualTour.com. Steve founded TRF Systems, the parent company of VisualTour, over 11 years ago. He has extensive experience in the practical application of digital cameras and virtual tour technologies to the real estate market. VisualTour has been enabling agents to easily create their own online virtual tours with any digital camera for over six years. Contact him at sjarrell@visualtour.com.

About VisualTour®

VisualTour (www.VisualTour.com) is developed by TRF Systems, Inc. of Coral Springs, Florida. Incorporated in 1991, TRF Systems is the leading provider of innovative digital photo management software and services in a number of vertical markets. VisualTour.com is recommended by the Council of Residential Specialists, the Allen F. Hainge CyberStars™, and the Real Estate CyberSpace Society. For more information, please contact J. L. Winn at TRF Systems at 954.345.9701 or by email at JLWinn@VisualTour.com. VisualTour.com is a trademark of TRF Systems.