File Size for E-mailing to Media

[Acorn]

Has anyone with experience of sending (e-mailing) jpegs to print media any advice on file size and a free programme that will accommodate multiple files?

[Manfred M]

Has anyone with experience of sending (e-mailing) jpegs to print media any advice on file size and a free programme that will accommodate multiple files?

I assume that you are asking about getting image files to a traditional publisher?

Two issues are in play here:

1. What are the file requirements of the group that are putting out the publication. You will need to get the specs from them so that your image files are compatible with their processes. This means you will need size, quality, colour space, etc. information from them. So far as I know if your images do not meet those specs, they will be rejected by the photo editor.

B&W specs have traditionally required that the image show the full gray-scale tonal range ranging from pure black to pure while values.

My advice here is to contact the photo editor to get the spec sheet from the media organization. This will be dictated by their internal workflow as well as the printing equipment that they use. News organizations may have rules about submitting the raw data to ensure that no unacceptable image manipulation has occurred in the submitted images.

2. The second issue are the email systems themselves. Restrictions by your email provider and / or the recipient's email provider will generally limit the size of the email attachments that can be sent or received. This may or may not be known and either end of the chain will have restrictions; exceed the size limits and your email will either be rejected at source or destination.

Large files are rarely emailed. Receivers will often have web portals that allow you to upload the files directly to the publisher. If this is not on the website, you will have get this information from the print media itself. The other method that is commonly used is to use a cloud based service like DropBox (which is my preference), Google Drive or Microsoft One Drive and give the organization receiving the media permission to access the folder where the specific files for them are stored on your cloud-based file storage service. A lot of these services will give you around 1 GB of free storage, so this is usually sufficient for this type of work.