File Sizing for Screen Savers

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Ghengis
Posts: 2
Joined: Mon Dec 10, 2012 2:18 pm

File Sizing for Screen Savers

Post by Ghengis »

Hi Everyone,

I have only just stated using gPhotoShow Pro and I wanted to know what is the minimum file sizing for great quality. Currently I have exported from RAW to JPEG at 100% - looks great and is nice and fast on my machine - but I have 32Mb RAM on a fast Laptop and a lot of people won't have a fast machine.

Each image is 3-5Mb so the screensaver file size is 119Mb. Do you have a recommendation for file size - also PPI - I have set to 72.

My other question is, I am creating screen savers for distribution - what is better - .EXE or .GSS

Thanks for your help

Mark
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gpb
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Posts: 761
Joined: Mon Dec 19, 2011 1:23 am

Re: File Sizing for Screen Savers

Post by gpb »

Hello,
the creation of a screen saver for distribution is always a trade-off between quality and size. You should resize you pictures to the size of most commonly used monitors, for example now the most common screen size is 1368x768. See here for some statistics.
Some people have screens with a higher resolution but in any case is not worth going over 1920x1080.
To save some space you can also tweak the jpeg quality, again you should find a compromise between quality and size. It is hard to give any suggestion for file size since it greatly depends on image resolution and complexity. For example one image could look great with a file size of 1Mb but another needs 2Mb, for this reason all software that save jpeg have a quality control instead of a size control. This mean that with a give quality settings all files will have a similar quality but different file size.
The best thing is to do some tests with different sizes and quality settings to see what is better for your images.

About the difference between .exe and .gss.
since Gss is specific gPhotoShow Pro file format, I guess you mean .scr.
.exe is a generic windows program. You need to double click on the program to start it. This format is best suited to slideshow that must always be started by the user.
.scr is screen saver, can be installed in the system and started by windows when the computer is idle. Of course it is can also be started manually by the user just a .exe
Usually .scr is the prefered format since it allows your slideshow to be set as a screen saver.
Gianpaolo Bottin
gPhotoShow.com
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