Images Types and How to Convert Them

The number of colors that a picture will show determines how big the file is to be. A file type that only handles only 256 colors (like the .gif format) is smaller than a file that can store 16 million colors (like the .png format). File formats like .bmp don’t compress the file the image at all and so are very large files.

A smaller format

Sometimes you want to have a photo image in a smaller format for storage or portability purposes. In this case, you will want to convert an image from one type to another. One of the easiest ways to do this is with Microsoft Paint, which comes free with all Windows-based computers.

To give you an example, a scanned picture of a signature page of a contract may be 2,739,000 bytes; the same image converted to .jpg format is only 89,000 bytes, a savings of 2,650,000 bytes–or 97% and a lot of room saved! It takes less time and room to email a .jpg file than it does a .bmp file.

Internet usage

Especially when it comes to the Internet, you don’t want to have huge pictures for the viewer to download; it simply takes too long. If web pages have to wait on several large image files to download, the user will often get tired of waiting and go somewhere else. This is where image file conversion really shows its stuff.

Using Microsoft Paint to Convert Images

Using Microsoft Paint is really easy:

1. Open Microsoft Paint

2. Go to File/Open and find your file and click OK (in this example a .bmp file)

3. Then go to File/Save As and select the file type you want to save it to (a .jpg)

4. Then click OK and it converts and saves your file

5. In this example, we went from 3,652,000 bytes to 338,000 bytes, a savings of 3,314,000 bytes of room on our hard drive or flash drive.

6. For better color, you might want to save the same file as a .png file, in which case it is 1,729,000 bytes, a savings of 1,923,000 or over half the original file size.

Microsoft Paint is very easy to use and it’s free, so now you can save large files, like scanned images, to more manageable sizes without losing appreciable picture fidelity or color.