banjer & all...the size of files is first determined by how you create them...scanning a slide, flat photo, or taking a picture with a digital camera...Some scanner & camera software has settings for how 'detailed' a picture you produce..(that is, how many pixels are crammmed into it, which determines how well it would survive being magnified & printed..(the more pixels, the better, if you want to print it out). Now, the more pixels per square inch, the bigger the size..(in bytes..and sometimes in actual screen width). You can have a fairly small picture be VERY densely packed, thus able to be zoomed on screen or printed as an 8x10...etc...but it takes disk space...so there are compromises when you email or store them..(or, when you make an online album!! That place I have the album gives me 20,000,000 bytes, which would be used up by about 18 of scarpi's pics....

now, to your question..*grin*...'if' you have a way to control the size of pic you produce, fine...if not, you would have to have a program to reduce it..that is, either by cropping [actually chopping off some parts unnesessary to the image], or by reducing the overall onscreen dimensions (from 10x14", to maybe 5x7"...which cuts the size to ¼, or by just making a copy at less resolution, which may be fine for online, but not good for printing.

There are many programs which will alter digital pictures, but you have to get and install one...(if you scanned the pic, you ought to have such a program with your scanner...if it was taken with a digital camera, you may not)...further, the format .bmp, .gif,.jpg, also determine the size...(early on, I got a couple in .bmp, which some cameras and scanner produce by default...and these are the biggest..) the same programs will 'convert' one format to another...at a price of resolution, etc...

some of the programs are simple, and essentially free, some are quite complex and expensive, (and all of them allow you to correct color, contrast, brightness, etc, to varying degrees...the pic of Roger In Baltimore had everything done to it...cropped, reduced, brightened)....so, the short answer..(ain't you glad you asked?) is that if you have a ½ million byte file, either you have to reduce/convert/crop it, or I do...(and 3 years ago, I had NO idea how any of this worked!) It can be fun to play with a free/cheap program...(lets you decide whether you want a fancy one)...but if you are not into it yet, or someone just did a pic for you and gave you a disk, then you'll just have to send it on at full size and trust me to mess with it and not ruin it...(I generally make a copy first, till I am sure I have a decent postable one.)...my only real problem is that I have a small hard drive and have to be careful how many pics I try to store.

So, this may be more than you wanted to know, but there are those new to all this who don't quite know how it works, and I wanted to try to get the overall principles noted...the details get even more complex then even I have stomach for. As the album gets bigger/better, I'm sure there will have to be decisions made...and I will need advice from those wiser in all this.