I'm having a heck of a time getting the thumbnails within the guidelines for posting and to keep the file size small enough I have to make them really small. I notice many people have nice size thumbnails. Just wondering how you do it. Sorry if it sounds rather stupid, but I'm kind of new to putting stuff up on a site like this :)

200 x 200 pixels maximum, .jpg format, smaller than 15 k. You'll need a paint program to size and compress into a jpg.

Yep, that I know, just can't get photoshop to get them small enough to look decent and stay within the guidelines, even at low quality for some reason. Should I try it in Paint?

Well if you're using Photoshop just use the ImageReady that installs with it. ImageReady is designed to reduce image sizes for use on the web for fast downloads. You can reduce and tweak till your heart is content. If you can't reach the maximum's listed by tjohn then you need to lose some detail from the thumb as the main pic itself will carry the detail.

make sure when you save it in photoshop that its not compressed too much. now if you want send me an im/pm and I will reply with my email addresss then you can email the image and I can try myself to get it to a decent size. No guarentee it will look any better than what you already got.

Thanks for all your help. I'll keep working on it :) You've been great. Maybe I'll get all the thumbnails up one of these days :)

I usually save the .jpg thumbnails using PaintShopPro because for some reason it saves them smaller than Photoshop. Wierd but true. Catlin

in photoshop 6, I use the File>Save for Web command... then adjust the image size and compression while watching the numbers for file size until things fall within the parameters I want.

yes, save for web...FWTempest hit it on the head... once saved for the web, the quality is still good and the file will probably be less than 10k

Attached Link: http://www.xnview.com/

Save for web seems to work very well. Thanks to all of you for the suggestions :) The help has been much appreciated and I learned something new :) Squeeka

Rendering the same scene at the small size (200 pixels for the longest edge) gives a pretty nice thumbnail. Then convert this .bmp into a .jpg compressed to about 62%. Some of my best ones are done this way - and load quick. Another way is to render at a maximum of 800x800 pixels and then reduce your picture to 25% of it's original size and save to .jpg as above. 50%. 25%, 12.5%, etc. nice and clean. Noel

I also use Paint Shop Pro for my thumbnails (and postwork too.) It's not too complicated. Just resize the image so that the largest dimension is 200 (dimensions should be constrained.) Rather than using the Save As> command, I use the Export>JPEG command to save. (the same is true when I change my full size pic from .bmp to .jpg) As this brings up the wizard screen where one can adjust the compression level. That way I adjust the compression to the minimum amount needed to bring the thumbnail around or under 10Kb (and 100kb for full size pics.) The neat thing about using this is you can see how far that you can push the compression before it starts getting blocky or distorted.