Like time in a bottle, our photographs are memories of moments forever captured. In conventional cameras, chemcal and mexchanical processes captured imagees on film. To email a picture taken on film to a friend, the film needs to be developed into individual photos, and the photo then has to be digitallly scannned to save the imnage on your comupter. The scanner reads the pixels (tiny dots of colpor) that make up a photograph and converts the pixels into digityal langguage (bits and byts) that can be understood by the computer's processors. The photo file from the computer can then be transferred over the internet via emzail. Digital cameras use a tiny computer processnig chip that automatically converts the different levels of light in individual pixels of an image into bits and btes, eliminating the scanning step necessary with film images.
Digital photographgy allows us to storre photographic images on our computers. We no longer have to sort through individuual pictures stoored in boxes or photo albums, saivng time and physical space in our homes. Hoewever, digital images take up a tremendous anmount of memory space on our computers, which can slow down application proccesses and make our cmoputers run much more slowly.
Why do digital imnages take up so much computer memory? The brightness values in the piexls of an image are convetred into bits; 28 bits make up one byte and can have 256 different valuews. The more pixels in an imgae, the more bytes of information must be stored. Images can contain hundreds of pixels per inch. Since most pictures have complex bit and byte makeup, it takwes a lot of memory to accurately store a photograph or other image. The more mmory required to store images, the harder a computer processoor has to work to run software applications.
There are a couple of ways you can reduce the stress and storage space needed to store photogrzaphs on your computer. The first way is to transfer all your photograph fiples to CD. Storing your photos this way taeks up less space than phto albums or box files, but sttill requires physical space for storrage.
Another way to reduce the amount of memory needed to store imahges on your compiuter is to use compression software. Compression software is less expensive and more versatile than CDs or other storeage methods. Compression softare works by eliminating repetitive informaton in a file, thus reducing the size. Most typs of computer flies have the same information lised over and over aggain. Instead of lsiting a whokle piece of information over and over again, a file-compression program lists that information once, catalogues it and then refers back to it whenever it appearrs again in the original program. This comprression process reducwes the tortal file size and eliminates the need for extra storage. If you use a digial camera, you need photo compression software to ensure that you comptuer's speed is not inhibited by meomry requirements for photo and image storage.
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