sharing big information
This post is for all those courageous young people who are going to dangerous and / or exotic places in the world to help in one way or another, and who have other things to worry about than technical details.
Please do not clog up your friends’ and families’ e-mail accounts with outrageously big reports and pictures!
Here are some suggestions:
- Images in Microsoft documents: If you copy photographs from your digital camera into Word, Excel, or Powerpoint documents, you will often end up with needlessly huge documents (several Megabytes). For once, Microsoft has added a very useful feature to reduce the size of all images contained in one document:
- right-click on one of the images in your document
- choose “format picture”
- go to the “Picture” Tab
- hit the “compress…” button
- select “All pictures in document”, “Web/Screen”, “Compress pictures”, and “Delete croppedareas of pictures”
- click “OK”, and “Apply” if there is a warning.
- Save the document, and you are done! Your document is likely a fraction of the size it was before!
- Don’t attach, but link (big documents): technically, it is way better to store data somewhere than to send something. Therefore, please do the following to share a big document:
- optional, but recommended: compress - or “zip” - your documents with a program like 7-zip or others.
- Go to divshare or mediafire and upload your file(s). (Both these services are free, and they don’t even require registration)
- Send your (mass) e-mail to your friends and family containing the link you just created on either one of the above services - do not attach any files anymore.
- Don’t attach, but link (pictures): for pictures and other media files, you may want to use PikiWiki(another free site): you can very easily create simple photo album pages. Send out the link to the page thereafter.
And please: don’t ever use the “To :” field for mass mailings’ Please put all the recipients’ e-mail addresses into the “Bcc :” or “Blind copy” field in your e-mail programm or webmail interface. This very simple measure contributes to reducing the impact of viruses and worms.
If you are technically inclined, there are many other alternatives too. If you even own your own website, that is probably the best place to put your data anyway. You probably know what you are doing, but if you need help, try to get my attention with an e-mail or comment…
Please post or send me a comment if any of the above info is wrong, turns old, if any links die, or if the services turn “unfriendly”.