Is Undo an Option Now?

[Birthday Bummer]

My grandson turned 1 this week. I quickly compressed about 50 photos for
email to my mother and brother. Obviously I did something I have never done
before because now the photos remain that terribly small size and when anyone
tries to enlarge them, they cannot without total distortion and blur. At
work, I compress photos often and send to other departments. I have not had
this problem before.

1. Does anyone know of a way to undo the compression of these photos so that
they might be printed or even enjoyed by the eye without a magnifying glass?

2. Do you know whay I may have done so differently to cause this?

Thank you for your time and input.

 

[JoAnn Paules [MSFT MVP]]

I hope you still have the pictures on your card?

 

[Echo S]

My grandson turned 1 this week. I quickly compressed about 50 photos for
email to my mother and brother. Obviously I did something I have never done
before because now the photos remain that terribly small size and when anyone
tries to enlarge them, they cannot without total distortion and blur. At
work, I compress photos often and send to other departments. I have not had
this problem before.

1. Does anyone know of a way to undo the compression of these photos so that
they might be printed or even enjoyed by the eye without a magnifying

glass?

If you've compressed the photos to be that small, there's really no way to
get back to the state they started in. Do you (hopefully) still have the
original images available somewhere?

2. Do you know whay I may have done so differently to cause this?

Hard to say, especially since we don't even know which program you used to
compress the photos. I'd guess that either your resolution setting was very
low, or the actual size (inches) of the output was set to very small.

See, resolution is actually measured in PPI, Pixels Per Inch. So there are
two measurements there -- number of inches, and number of pixels in each
inch. So if you set resolution to 72 (PPI), but the output (or original
picture) is only 1-inch by 1-inch, you only have 72x72 pixels to work with.
And that's not very much. On the other hand, if you set resolution to 72
(PPI) and the output or original picture is 10-inches by 5-inches, you have
720x360 pixels to work with, and that's much better.

Considering that many computer screen displays are set to 800x600, a 720x360
pixel image will fill almost all of the screen width-wise, and about half
the screen length-wise. Of course, if your computer display is set to
1024x768, that 720x360 image will fill a smaller portion of that screen.

Make sense?