Stupid photo manipulation rubbish

Aaaarggh! Just hit the first snag with the new PC. I have taken a lot of photos with digital cameras over the years - I copied my 2006 and 2007 photos to the PC today, and there were over 4000 of them. I have them going back to 2002, which really was the dark ages for digital photography. No, I lie. I checked and I have some going back to March 1999. I have stuck them into this page - they are from a ballooning festival in Canberra.





I am a nice person when it comes to emailing photos to other people - I always compress them before sending them. The current camera averages about 1.3mb per photo, so I always compress them.















Interestingly, looking back at the 1999 photos, the are all about 58kb straight out of the camera. I think I was using some sort of Kodak beastie back then. They still look pretty good today.

So I always try to get the photos down to say 250kb before I send them out. I hate getting an email and it taking 5 minutes to open because I have been sent 4 x 2mb photos. It's alright for those on superbroadband, but we are still slumming it on 512kb at home.

We went out for a BBQ in a local park today, as the sun was shining and the seagulls were looking hungry and underfed and it has just been too long since I last wielded the BBQ tongs. Photos were taken, and tonight I wanted to zap them to the usual suspects.

Trouble is, this stupid Vista crap only comes with Paint, and Paint is no good for compressing JPG's. I really like the photo viewer that comes with Vista, but the bloody thing has everything but a compression option. It is smart enough to compress a file if you want to attach it to an email, but that means setting up and using Windows Mail (used to be Outlook Express) and I am stuffed if I want to use that instead of gmail. I have become used to the idea of using a web client for my email, so the last thing I want to do is have to fart around and configure a fat client on my PC. There are times when Microsoft is really smart, and there are times when it is really stupid.

So there I am, trying to work out how to use the viewer thingy to compress some photos without first having to email them to someone. You can't. Well, maybe you can, but you'll need a rocket science degree to work out how to do it. It is the dumbest bit of smart software that I have seen in a long time.

The solution? Download and install paint.net. I hate paint.net. It should be called pain.net. I only want to do two things with it, but it gives me 57 options in 98 flavours and a bunch of colours to boot - I just want to compact the photo and send it! Give me a break.

I now have to use two programs to do what I want to do. Use the photo viewer thing to browse the photos, then select the ones I want to send, then open pain.net and compact them, then open gmail and send them off.

Is this computers making life easier? Ha! Sounds like beauracracy run mad!