Job Discussion Forums

naturegirl321 · Joined: 04 May 2003 Posts: 9041 Location: home sweet home

Which is better when sending attachments to people for jobs, jpeg or bmp?
Thanks!

metalgeek · Joined: 12 Aug 2003 Posts: 38

jpg is compresed.
bmp is not.
use jpg:)

AlexW · Joined: 02 Aug 2003 Posts: 17 Location: Sussex, UK

Alternatively just paste the pic into a textbox within Word (if that's the format they want - usually is), get rid of the black line around the outside, and it's part of your document.

Agree with Metalgeek about jpeg. One other thing is that bmp isn't so good on subtle gradations of colour (as in skin tones, and what not) - for aesthetic reasons as well.

One more thing (which you probably already know): your intended employer may well be using a really sucky 56K dial-up connection, not broadband. Don't make your pic bigger than about 25K (so, about 200*150 pixels) or they will just get pissed off at the download time.

Cheers, Al

naturegirl321 · Joined: 04 May 2003 Posts: 9041 Location: home sweet home

less than 25K? yeah right, i think the scanners here are weird. Mind are around 60K. Maybe that's why Yahoo won't let me send anything.

lajzar · Joined: 09 Feb 2003 Posts: 647 Location: Saitama-ken, Japan

The bit about bitmap and colours is wrong. Bitmap is an umbrella term for several differnt colour depths of graphic format. At the low end, the colour depth, or shallowness if you will, is painfully obvious. At the high end, the colour depth is actually superior to jpg. Also, because jpg is compressed, there will always be some data loss compared to a bitmap, although this is in theory so small as to be un-noticeable.

But I agree, for sending a picture with a job application, send it as a jpg, and small file size. Most graphics editors today include options in teh save as dialog boxes to specify the amount of compression to use when saving a jpg file.

Stephen Jones · Joined: 21 Feb 2003 Posts: 4124

Send photos jpg and send documents .gif

Both are compressed formats. The difference is that .jpg is a lossy format; that is to say you lose part of the quality according to the level of compression. On the other hand .gif is a lossless format, that is to say the compressed copy is the same quaity as the uncompressed copy. However .gif's only have 256 colors, so they are not that useful for photos which have fine gradations, and also because they are lossless they don't save a lot of space on some photo types. They are however excellent for vector graphics (cliipart and logos) and for documents like degrees.

.bmp is the raw format. Each pixel is represented by 24, 16, 0r 8 bits, whcih define it's color as one of 16.7 million, for a 24 bit bitmap or 65,000 for a 16 bit bitmap, or 256 for an eight bit bitmap. Now this is the best quality, and is the starting point the compression formats work from, so the guy who said the colors were not as good as for .jpg's is just plain wrong. However the format takes up way too much space. An A$ document will take up about 7MB when scanned at a normal resolution, and you would not be able to get your ISP to deliver any message you put it in, so converit it to .jpg or .gif, depending on the type of document.

Alex W's siggestion of embedding the graphic within Word is not a great idea in my opinion. When the graphic is embedded in Word it is converted to a Windows metafile, and the file size is generally greater. It does make it easier to print if you have half a dozen documents though, but I still reckon you are better sending each graphic separately.

Incidentally, most documents will comrpess down to about 60K. After that level you often find a significant loss of clarity, so would forget about trying to save your graphics in 25k files. Remember that although they may look fine on the monitor as web graphics saved a 72dpi, they will not look that good on paper, so try and keep the level round about 150dpi.

naturegirl321 · Joined: 04 May 2003 Posts: 9041 Location: home sweet home

I tried to copy and paste it into Word, and it turned out to be bigger. I was originally 900KB and is now 926KB.

So, I tried to resave it as something else, I'm not sure what because I can't read Chinese. Now it's 15KB and is RTF.

How can I shrink files?!? I"m not usually this computer illiterate, but everything's in Chinese.

Stephen Jones · Joined: 21 Feb 2003 Posts: 4124

I've already mentioned this on another thread (you really shouldn't start two threads on the same tooic) but adding something into Word merely adds the Word document file size to the original size.

You really must get a graphics program with an English inteface. In the Paradise of software piracy that should not be too difficult. If you have a good internet connection, then download Irfanview from http://www.irfanview.com It is free and will allow you to convert without too much of a problem.

If you have any further queries use the email facility the forum provides. And I suggest you request the moderator to transfer the posts from the other thread to this one.

Corey · Joined: 05 Jul 2003 Posts: 112 Location: Canada

Neither. If the documents are balck and white, or simple colours use .gif - much smaller than jpg. BMP is great quality but by far the largest.

You can convert between formats if you have a program like Adobe Photoshop, 20/20 (free) or something similar.

Good luck,

Corey

AlexW · Joined: 02 Aug 2003 Posts: 17 Location: Sussex, UK

naturegirl321 · Joined: 04 May 2003 Posts: 9041 Location: home sweet home

No, no. My scanned degree and passport and all that good stuff are really large files, but I went back to the place and shouted at the man. He looked so confused, it took him over an hour, but he FINALLY figured out how to shrink the files. And they call him a computer expert, scary, isnt' it?