I recently purchased a new digital camera that can create pictures of up to 8 megapixels. I love the quality of the photographs this camera gives. However, storing and sharing 8-megapixel images creates a few problems.
First of all, the file sizes are huge. Most of the pictures I take consume about 3 megabytes of disk space to store a single image. That's twice the size of a standard floppy disk just to store one picture! (Does anyone use floppy disks anymore?) Of course, there are no film developing costs; so, I click the shutter many, many times in hopes of obtaining the perfect picture. I may not save all of the photos, but I often keep two or three variations of everything I photograph. The result consumes many megabytes of disk space.
Disk space is no longer much of an issue these days. Hard drives have become so cheap that we can almost ignore those problems. If your present computer's disk drive is nearly full, you can go out and purchase a 300-gigabyte USB plug-in disk drive for about $90 or so, after rebates.
Even though storage space is no longer an issue, the huge file sizes become an issue elsewhere. For instance, it is almost impossible to send these huge files by e-mail. They are also almost impossible to use in web pages.
For Windows users, there is a free and easy solution.
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