Facebookers: Stop taking high resolution photos!

Today's article will be about SNS and proliferation of photo uploading by vain users who want to show off so many things that they think needs urgent attention so that thoughts could be shared, nonetheless humanity can survive mighty fine without them.

10 MP cameras have become commonplace, and the old analog ones are have almost finished phasing out. You no longer think twice before taking a shot like you did with an analog photo, as you can see the results right after taking one, and take another if the previous one was not. See how much you save up by not having to stock up film rolls? Not to mention the reduced incidence of missed shots, where you keep regretting how you could've taken a good shot of a particular event and reminisce it, though your life could go on perfectly without it (sorry for my insistence).

When the digicam debuted with minuscule resolution, it wasn't as crisp as the analog counterpart, and people had doubt whether it's a viable alternative. Time casted that doubt away, and the digicam almost outclasses analog, especially in the consumer market, the latter has been rendered obsolete.

Though the digicam has already fulfilled the minimum requirement to be on par with analog camera for the masses, consumerism causes the manufacturers to further advance the technology, and mass-market them to push the old models out of the market, so that more of the new ones can be sold, hence ensuring steady sales (this is going way off topic; it is covered by consumerism).

The consumer requirement

An average Jane seldom prints anything larger than 4R. At 300 dpi, that translates to roughly 2.2 MP. If you print on 4D, a 4:3 photo size, it would be 2.4 MP. Yet, when she prospects for a new digicam, the salesman goes through all lengths to explain why it's better to have large MP camera. Jane would probably understand less than half of what MP is supposed to mean, but she will get the idea that the bigger the MP, the better. Thus she ends up with a digicam that is overfeatured.

Consumer ignorance

Jane resorts to using Easy Mode that is featured on her camera as she is not familiar with photography settings. And the resolution is also left to default: 10 MP, the maximum offered on the camera. That is more than 4 times the resolution needed to print 4R/4D. This would mean that she can could only take roughly 4 times less number of photos due to storage constraint.

Enter the SNS

Jane, like many SNS users who own a digicam, will most likely attempt to upload her photos to the SNS for others to view. Here comes another pain to the user: the upload time will be very long for as a 10 MP photo's file size is enormous. If her intention was just to show off the photo she took, this fact will flabbergast her: the photo that is displayed to others on the SNS site is actually a sampled down version of the one she uploaded! In case of Facebook, the photo will be scaled so that the maximum of both the width and height is 720 px. For a 4:3 image, the resolution would be 720×540, or about 0.4 MP. That amounts to 96% px wasted!

Waste of space, waste of time, waste of power

You saw that on the user side, there's wastage of:

• space: Jane could've taken 2.4 MP picture and save up to 75% space taken. If she took the picture only for uploading to SNS, she could've reduced another 2 MP.
• time: Jane had to wait for the photo to be processed i.e. sampled down. A single photo won't take long, but as the number of photos she uploads in one go multiplies, so does the total time taken to prepare for upload.

What can you do?

If you own a digicam, or know someone who own a digicam, who don't know any better how to handle digicams, tell them to stop using superhigh resolutions. They ought to know when it is appropriate to use 10 MP.

Now it'd be great if someone made a camera tailored specially for Facebookers i.e. having 720x540 mode.