Image Formats Narrative - Full Text Copy and Paste

Joshua Arant
EDUC 6305
Image Formats – Narrative

I have searched for images online that speak to who I am as a person. I chose an image of the Grand Canyon and Mt. Everest because I love travel and hiking (although I am not crazy enough to try Everest), two photographs of space images because I am fascinated by the universe’s size and the many facets of astronomy (as I mentioned in my photo story), and one animated picture of the gang of peanuts characters (i.e. Charlie Brown and Snoopy) because I have always loved the program. I have been looking at the names, sizes, and type of files. Below is a link to a spreadsheet where I present the name, size, file type, and date modified for the five files I used for this assignment.

http://spreadsheets.google.com/pub?key=pLpsg_-9TutQ0QxIBne7FPQ

I have learned a great deal about how to navigate through the desktop to find images that I have downloaded from the internet. I can see that images and graphics vary greatly in the way they are formatted on the computer and that many different types of image formats exist. The same image can be converted to different file types, and this often changes the file size and the picture quality. Picasa seems to be a great program for organizing images, and I love that it is set up to automatically post any of your images to your blog. This program brings all of your image files to one location while maintaining your original organization of these files. This is fantastic because it turns an otherwise long and tedious process into a couple of clicks.
In my sample, jpg is the most common file type. The minimum file size in my sample is 38 KB and the maximum sample is 303 KB. The average size is 124.8 KB. I looked through many images other than the five that I selected for the assignment. Most of the images I saw were jpg files. However, most of the files that I looked through were photographic. I looked at some animated images and they were all gif files. I looked at many more photographic images than animated images, so my five are a pretty good representative sample of all the images I looked at with regard to file type. Based on my five images and all the images that I considered, I would conclude that most images on the internet are jpg files. Of course, this is not a valid conclusion because I have not looked at a diverse enough sample of images. However, I might reasonably conclude that photographic images are more likely to be jpg files than animated images and that animated images are more likely to be gif files.
I took the image of Mt. Everest (originally a jpg file), opened it in paint, and changed it to a bitmap. The icon changed from the Corel Photo icon (in jpg) to a Microsoft Paint icon (in bitmap). The bitmap version had much higher quality than the jpg version. This was increasingly evident as I zoomed in on both versions. The bitmap file is also roughly ten times the size of the jpg file. Based on this and my observations of many other jpg and gif files, it seems that the file size increases with picture quality. More importantly, the file size seems to increase much more with picture quality than with picture size. The animated files were all much smaller than the photographic files. Higher quality photographic files were much larger than lower quality photographic images.
In summary, many different types of images are available online for use and storage on your desktop. Various types of files are used to provide a variety of image types and qualities for people’s various needs and conditions. File type and file size seem to be very closely related to image quality. I have learned a great deal about online graphics and imaging, but I still have a great deal to learn.