I've never used irfanview. That said, ...

It seems to be letting me resize by changing the dpi, does that seem likely?

There's two different types of "resizing". You can resize by reducing the number of pixels. This involves resampling the image and results in a loss of quality (fewer pixels means lower quality). You can also resize by increasing the dpi, but keeping the total number of pixels the same. This makes the image print smaller, but keeps the intrinsic image the same.

Does it tell you the dimensions in pixels before and after you resize? If those numbers don't change, then irfanview is letting you do the latter form of resizing. This is good and is probably what you want.

Okay - I also checked the size of the file and it does seem to increase when I do that.

(I also emailed one of them to the photo manager to see if it fit into their specs.)

What format is the file before and after you do your thing? If it's a jpeg, you might be better off sending the original image to the photo manager, since jpegs lose quality every time you resave them.

He won't use it if it's less than 300 dpi.

I've got to try downloading my pictures onto my new laptop this weekend--I've got the software in it already, so it's just a matter of figuring out how to get it from the camera into the hard drive.

A quick question about compressed MP3 tracks: I was hoping I could just plug my mp3 player into my car's stereo, but now I find out (three years after I bought the car) that's not an option. I can play CDs with WAV or compressed MP3 files, though, so I'd like to put all of my music onto a few discs and just leave those in the car all the time. What's the best way to do this?

He won't use it if it's less than 300 dpi.

What format are you saving to? To maximize the quality, you should NOT be saving to a jpeg. There's nothing you can do about improving the source file (if it's a jpeg), but *resaving* it after increasing the dpi will only degrade the quality further. Can you save to another format like TIF? If so, do that.

What's the best way to do this?

Just drag a bunch of mp3's to your cd burner. You might want to organize the mp3s into different folders, like put each album (or playlist, etc) in a separate folder and name the folder after the album. Your car stereo should be able to skip from folder to folder, like how you can skip from disk to disk in a multi-disk player.

Oh, and you might want to number your tracks so they play in the correct order (if you care about that). Like prepend '01' onto the first track's file name, '02' onto the second, etc. for each album.

This is all assuming that the car stereo doesn't read the mp3 tags. Also, you might want to check the manual to see if it can handle file names longer than 8 characters.

I had an mp3 cd player in my Focus, so I have lots of discs where I did stuff like this. I bought it back in '01 or so, so perhaps the technology (reading the mp3 tags, file length issues, etc.) has improved since then.

I can save it to a different sort of file - do you recommend tif?

I can save it to a different sort of file - do you recommend tif?

Yes. Take your original source file (before you did anything to it), change the DPI as you did earlier, but then immediately save it as a TIF file.

These are files that other folks have emailed to you? I suspect that they sent them at screen resolution which is 72dpi and will look like hell no matter what you do to print them. If so you need to get them to send you new copies at the highest resolution they have.