Mike called from Tacoma, WA, to say his wife's digital pictures are too big to e-mail. He said she takes high-resolution photos. I answered his call on the air but many people wanted me to repeat what I said, so here's the deal!

The high-resolution setting on your wife's camera may be uncompressed TIFFs, or JPGs with little compression. Such files are very large.

Your wife can reduce the quality settings on her camera. Or, she can Use editing software to reduce the size of the picture.

Windows XP will do it, too. Just right-click an image file from Windows Explorer. Choose Send To, E-Mail Recipient from the shortcut menu. In the next box, the Make My Pictures Smaller option is selected by default.

For instance, I have a TIFF (Filename.TIFF) file on my computer. I used Irfanview, a free editing program, to convert it to a JPG, a compressed format. I also set the dots per inch to 72, which is acceptable for viewing on a monitor or TV. I set the DPI to 300 on a second copy. That's a good size for printing.

These changes shrank the picture from 15 megabytes to 173 kilobytes. That's a reduction of nearly 99 percent. Practically any editing program can accomplish changes like this.  My favorite is IrfanView, which can be downloaded for free through my site!