[Tom]

I did try to check what JPEG quality MS paint uses. Look like they don't actually let you see or change it. Probably similar to the medium or low quality in camera setting. I'm not sure I would encourage iron to save large files. He's obviously happy with the JPEG quality that MS paint uses. And who cares if you have a few extra JPEG artifacts in a 36 MP image?

[mike]

That's true. I didn't dig deep enough to see the size in pixels of a "normal" or "fine" quality jpg coming out of that camera. Might be plenty good enough.

[iron]

question still stands: has anyone here saved with Paint and seen/compared the quality?

[osprey]

To answer your original question: it doesn't look like MS Paint has any scriptable command line options other than to open a file, and print. link So to do what you want, you would need to have a program that will simulate mouse clicks and key strokes. I think AutoIt will do that for you. Link

[puzzlr]

Iron, I don't have access to MSPaint, but I run all my JPEGs through a program called JpegMini. It's definitely saving space and not affecting how the photo looks. I actually take most of my photos in raw and edit from that, but convert all but the best to JPEG only and then shrink with JpegMini. Most of my photos don't deserve more than 2 or 3 MB of space - e.g. weeds along the road. DPReview has some discussion about it. One interesting quote is "Gill says camera manufacturers don't like to use a lot of compression because too many reviewers and customers think that image quality and the amount of detail in an image can be determined by the size of the file created, and that people associate smaller file sizes with lower levels of picture information. Camera brands, he says, don't want to produce files that are smaller than their competitors as some reviewers will immediately mark them down for it without studying the comparison images." I've done a pixel-by-pixel subtraction in Photoshop layers of before and after versions with no difference and seen similar tests by professional photographers online. It's enough to convice me to make this part of my workflow. Over time this saves me many Gigabytes of disk space and makes photo browsing much snappier. The savings are multiplied for the 3 backup copies that get made (live, periodic snapshot and online). I don't know what MSPaint does, but I would agree that there is non-visual "fat" in some JPEGs that can be removed without affecting how it looks. You can turn JpegMini loose on your entire collection of photos once you've convinced yourself that it works as advertised.

[Sore Feet]

Iron, you very likely won't see any noticeable difference after saving the image once in MS Paint. JPEG compression by its very nature is lossy, meaning each time you save a file over itself, you will lose some data. The fact that you're reducing your file size from 30 mb down to just a fraction of that indicates you're losing a ton of data, but chances are a lot of that is EXIF, Metadata, and color profile stuff which you don't necessarily need. Saving once to reduce the file size is going to be fairly innocuous. But if you save the same file again and again and again, you will likely start to see artifacting show up. As others have stated, if you're more worried about file size rather than the quality of the image, I would definitely recommend just shooting at a smaller size directly out of the camera, then you won't have to worry about reducing the file size so much because you won't be using so much of that resolution that probably isn't making a huge difference anyway (since full size 36mp pictures will be several times larger than your monitor).

[Dalekz]

I am not a camera expert--just know enough to get by. On my camera (Pentax K50) there are two settings for the picture that you can adjust, and get smaller size files. 1 JPEG Recorded Pixels (picture size -- recorded pixels 16M, 12M, 8M and 5M) 2 JPEG Quality (Best to good) Don't know if the camera in question has something similar, but I assume the OP wants the best JPEG quality and the smallest recorded pixels (not poster size pic but maybe 8 x 10 for picture frames)

[Randito]

[Tom]

I would venture to guess it's more important to worry about the quality you are saving the file at as opposed to the number of times you have opened the file and saved it. For example, if I had saved the file at 100% quality and closed and reopened it again repeating a thousand times I bet it looks way better than saving the file once at 50% quality. Because once you save it at 50% quality there's no going back to higher quality.

[Randito]

[texasbb]

If you want to automate graphical editing tasks (resizing, changing jpg quality, adding borders, etc., etc.), forget all those ridiculous GUI-bound programs and install ImageMagick. Be sure to check the box for legacy tools (like convert) when installing. Then work from the command line: convert -resize 800x myphoto.jpg myphoto-med.jpg <-- force to 800 pixels wide convert -resize x600 myphoto.jpg myphoto-med2.jpg <-- force to 600 pixels tall convert -quality 70 myphoto.jpg myphoto-lowres.jpg <-- create a smaller low-res version mogrify -quality 70 myphoto.jpg <-- create low-res version and OVERWRITE original Etc. The two main commands are convert and mogrify, which do exactly the same things, but the former creates a new file and leaves the old one untouched, while the latter irretrievably overwrites the old file. Run either command with no arguments to get a (long) list of the options. You can do almost anything. Edit: Fixed goof in option name.

[mike]

[iron]

[mike]

I don't worry about the tb's. I don't need to keep my crappy photos. Makes finding stuff easier for starters.

[Stefan]

maybe you could send me an example of the two files. I can put it on my big screen television...(60') and see if I can see a difference.