File Size Essentials!

Do you know your bytes and pixels from your mega/kilo/giga/tera bytes? If not, read on...

If you're planning on sharing video with your students any time soon, this is a critical consideration. Even the video recorded on an ordinary iPhone 4, records in 'high definition', '1080p', which is geek for HUGE.​

So, even a 1 minute video can easily be 200MB, think 200 suitcases as a rough analogy, and you're getting close.

What you really need for stress free sharing is to avoid sharing files (including video files) that are larger than 100MB, ideally you want to keep it <50MB.

The smallest unit of memory is a bit, then a byte, and they go up in thousands from there, so a thousand bytes in a kilobyte, a thousand kilobytes in a megabytes... and so on.

Here's some posters/pictures that might help, maybe put one of these up in your room, to help yourself and your students to become much more savvy about sizes.

Megabytes are the most common size you'll use, here's a guide:

1 Megabtye (MB) =

• 1 LARGE image (2000 pixels)

• 1 page PDF

• 1 minute of music

• 1000 pages of text

• 1 second of video

Unless you're using video, you rarely need more than 1 Megabyte, like you rarely need more than one suitcase! Even if you use video, it should really never be more than 1 minute (60MB) for online use.

Inline as images and simpler versions added below as PDFs