Compressing jpeg's for email 300Kb

[Matt London]

Hello,

Am sending out some holiday snaps to my girlfriend's family and want to find a quicker way to compress them all down to about 300Kb each to be emailed.  These pics don't need to be edited in Photoshop as the exposures and crops are already good enough out of camera for this purpose - this is about saving time and getting them sent as quick as possible!

Have tagged the ones to send in a folder in Photomechanic then done right-click "save selected photo as".  I know you can then pull the sizer bar across to the left to copy and compress the jpegs down, but the smallest it will make each file is about 1mb. 

Is there any way I can compress them down smaller to about 300Kb? Original files are large Jpeg from 5D MkII about 6-10mb each.

Many thanks

Matt

[FVlcek]

Is there any need to keep them at the original size?

Just resize them to e.g. 2000pix and select subsample chroma, you can easily get to 200-300 kB each.

A full-size Large JPEG from 5DII compressed to 300kB without downsizing would look downright awful, it would be blocky as hell, more like an abstract painting.

[Matt London]

Thanks Frantisek,

I didn't realise compressing the full-size jpeg to 300k would cause that much damage to how the image looked.  Just thought it would squash it down for ease of emailing, but would still look fine on screen - as that's all they'll do with them.

I also didn't understand what subsample chroma did and have just read up on it - thanks for your help, that is the perfect solution for my request.