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.

I have nothing to add, sumi, except I feel your pain.

Thanks, everyone.

I figure that many of these photos were probably taken with less than ideal equipment (camera phone) and probably there is not much to be done with them at all.