Stupid digital cameras

[doolols]

I love digital photography. I love the immediacy, and the ability to quickly and easily publish them to websites, and the ability to crop and resize, so they show exactly what you want to show.

HOWEVER ...

My Junk Mail inbox seems to filling up with people wanting to give me a Sony DSC-R1 http://www.digitalreview.ca/cams/SonyDSC_R1.shtml. 10.3 bloomin' megapixels??? All well and good, and puts my Olympus 3.0 megapixel jobbie to shame, but what good do all those pixels do? Firstly, most of the pictures people take are crap - poorly composed, non-focussed snaps of Aunt Gertrude and cousin Trixie. But my main beef is - people will email these pictures to each other willy-nilly. My 3 megapixles create about 700k of JPG file. This Sony thing must create files of around 2.5MB each! And using Outlook Express, you don't know they're coming. You just watch the "Downloading Email" thing for ages and ages and ages. I'm filled with trepidation in case someone I know gets one of these behemoths.

What the camera people should do is create an automatic .. thing ... whereby if they try to send s BIG photo, it automatically resizes it to 800X600 pixels, or summat. Or does anyone know of a SIMPLE program which will resize an image. I'm not thinking of a traditional graphics package, but something which will just resize a digital photo with one click, and very little else?

[Ed]

Another one of the drawbacks of still being on 56k - but I see your point.  I'm on a stupid download limit with BT, so I've got to watch what I download, otherwise I go over the limit and pay a fee for it.

The simplest way of resizing a photo to send is to upload it to http//:imageshack.us - they automatically resize huge images for you, and then you can copy them back to your comp for sending via e-mail.  The obvious alternative is for the sender to just send the url of the pic to the e-mail recipient, so they can choose whether or not they even want to see it

I like the bigger resolutions, because you can crop a poorly composed picture into a better one without losing definition, but you're right - the filesize is a problem when sending un-optimised images via e-mail.