Note on Image Formats

I've experimented with several different types of image formats, both for the images of people that I have scanned and want to display and make available, and also for the charts that I make with Family Tree Maker. Until now, I have used jpg for scanned images and emf for charts, but I'm always reconsidering. If you have any suggestions or complaints, please let me know.

Charts made with Family Tree Maker (FTM)

With about 1000 people now listed in my database, the problem of describing or displaying the data is a formidable one. I'm sure it will only get bigger as the database grows. One way to describe the data is to make a visual display of part of the family tree. Family Tree Maker software does a nice job of this, although I might wish for a little more flexibility. Charts can be saved as pdf files, either multi-page or one-page, or as jpg, png, bmp or emf images. All these have their advantages and disadvantages.

The first things I look at are compatibility and legibility. Can I put them in my webpages in a way that's convenient and readable for viewers.

The Adobe pdf files are very nice, but they don't embed as part of a webpage. I could make them available as attachments. The jpg, bmp and png all have blurry text when I paste them into a webpage. But I think all of these are supported by most browsers. The emf is a Microsoft format. The text is nice and clear. The disadvantage is that emf is not supported by non MS browsers. So you have to use Internet Explorer, or else save each image and open it in Word or some other MS application. For non-IE users, they are essentially attachments.

Another consideration is file size. I tried an experiment with one chart, saved in all formats, and got the following file sizes.

Clearly the bmp option is out of the question. I don't know why the file is so large, or why FTM even offers this option. The emf file is small and the image is very clear, which is why I chose emf. The jpg and png are lamost 10 times as large, and images are blurry. The Google sites have a limit of 1 MB for images, so these would have to be reduced in size, resulting in even blurrier images. I can reduce the resolution, resulting in a smaller file, but the image is blurry. You can click on the image and get an enlargeable one that is legible. Below is a png that I reducaed to 161 KB. Compare with the emf images on the Immigration Timeline page.

FTM also has the capability to put in background images. I found that this increased the file size from 169 KB to 10,586 KB, for an emf, and similar increases for a jpg. It does make the chart look nicer, but it's not worth the extra Megabytes!

Scanned Images

One of the things that first got me interested in genealogy was the old pictures that I found, going through my parents' belongings, after my Mother died. Many of them were well over 100 years old, and they were deteriorating. I wanted to preserve them in electronic form. I brought back a suitcase full of pictures and memorabilia, and I have scanned hundreds of images. Although I'm not a pro, I did the best job I could. Scanning photos is a fine art, as I have discovered. I don't do any fancy touch-ups with photoshop or anything like that. I just use a Canon Pixma MP450, which is a scanner/copier/printer. It can scan up to 600 dots per inch, and allows me to set the contrast and brightness. I use IrfanView, which is a very nice (and free!) image viewer, to work with images.

After scanning several hundred images in jpg format, I heard on some message baord that it's better to use bmp, because jpg is a lossy format. That means you lose information whenever you resize, crop, or do anything to the picture. I think it's because jpg doesn't treat each pixel seperately, but tries to economize by recording only the change from one pixel to the next. So a picture with a lot of horizontal stripes would have a small file size.

I have noticed that some operations will noticeably increase the size of a jpg. Hopefully, that is to minimize the loss of information. If I have a picture that is over the 1 MB limit, I try to reduce it by cropping and saving the important part of the picture, or by using the "resize and resample" function in IrfanView. Either one of these can actually increase the file size. Also, if I have an image that needs to be rotated by 90 degrees, I find that the file size increases by a factor of about 4.