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Evernote enlarging my emailed photos?


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Warning - newbie alert!  I've been playing around with Evernote for a couple of days to see how I can make it work for me.  I've tried taking pictures of hand-written notes, clipping web pages, clipping a PDF, creating a checklist, etc.  Tonight I took a picture (using the camera icon in Evernote) of a Word document I had printed several months ago.  When I opened the Evernote desktop program (for Windows) and synced the program, I got a message that I had used half of the space on my free account.  Huh???  I looked at the note that had just been created and noticed it was 5.6MB.  Wowza!  For a 1-page list of cat food?

After searching the forum to find out how to create a smaller image, I found a suggestion to use the native iPhone Photo app and email the picture to Evernote because that app would allow you to select a size to send.  Since I didn't want to waste even more of my remaining space in Evernote, I took a picture with the Photos app and emailed 3 sizes to my Gmail account so I could check how big they were.  All of the photos were under 800k so I forwarded them from Gmail to Evernote.  I decided the "small" and "medium" photos were too small to easily read but I liked how the "large" one looked - until I looked at the size in Evernote - 2.7MB.  Wha wha what???

I did some more looking at the notes created. 
The "small" photo is 53.2k in Gmail, but 127k in EN.
The "medium" is 163k in Gmail, but 458k in EN.
The "large" is 794k in Gmail, but 2.7MB in EN.

The only difference between the photos in Gmail and the ones in Evernote is that they had been forwarded a second time (from Gmail to Evernote).  To see how much space was added by forwarding the email a second time, I forwarded the Gmail email with the "large" picture back to myself.  The forwarded file in Gmail was 796k - only 2k more than what was originally forwarded to Evernote.  How can the same note become 2.7MB in Evernote?

My apologies if this has already been addressed in the forum - I did look in advance, without success.

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  • Level 5*

Hi,  welcome to the forums.  I haven't been aware of any difference in picture sizes before - it's obviously a good idea to keep your uploads to a minimum to avoid the limit (bad things can happen if you cross that particular horizon);  and it's also a good idea not to use Evernote as a picture library - Picasa, Flickr and various cloud options all offer both more space and more tools.  Having said which notes can very usefully contain pictures to add to the text content.

 

When you look at a picture in Gmail you can get the exact size of the picture,  but how are you checking the size in Evernote?  From the note size?  Bear in mind that if you're forwarding pics to Evernote by email the note includes information from the email as well as the actual picture,  and the format the picture is saved in may affect the size too..

 

I just checked a random JPG sitting in a 735KB note in my database and saved it to my desktop - where it's a 734KB JPG in Windows,  so there doesn't seem to be an automatic inflate/ deflate thing going on - this is a note where I dragged and dropped the picture.  You might find that if you email pics to yourself to drag and drop into the desktop version,  or 'share' them to Evernote directly on your phone you'll get more bits for your buck.

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Hi gazumped.

Thanks for the response!  I'm not trying to use Evernote as a picture library, but I was planning on taking pictures of my handwritten notes to store in Evernote.  Since my spiral notebook was out of reach when I decided to start playing with Evernote, I just grabbed whatever was convenient - the cat food chart that I was using in my examples above. 

I tried two different things today.  (And yes, I am using the status bar in Evernote to determine the note size.)
1.  I emailed the photo mentioned in my last post from the iPhone photo app, using the "large" size, directly to Evernote.  It resulted in a note size of 2.7MB - the same as when I forwarded it to Gmail and then to Evernote.  (The .jpg size per Gmail is 580k and the iPhone says the "large" size is 584k).
2.  After reading your comments about dragging versus emailing, I tried dragging the 580k .jpg photo attached to the email directly into Evernote.  Much to my shock, it resulted in a note that is 7.6MB!

So now I really am almost at the limit for free accounts, but at least I got some information to help me understand what is happening.  The 7.6MB note was assigned a title in Evernote of "6rvxipmm.bmp".  Aha!  so the 580k .jpg that I dragged from Gmail to Evernote became a 7.6MB .bmp.  That got me looking at the file types on the other notes.  Turns out, everything in Evernote that came from my iPhone, whether through the Evernote app directly or emailed from the iPhone camera app, is being stored as a .png file. 

EXCEPT - there is one photo of my mother I took through the Evernote app that is stored as a .jpg.  So I try taking a picture of a photo hanging on my wall through the Evernote app and realize my camera has multiple settings, including photo and document.  Thinking the difference is the setting, I take 2 pictures through Evernote of the photo on the wall.  One was with the photo setting and one with the document setting thinking one would come across as a .jpg and the other as a .png.  Wrong!  They are both .jpg files but the photo is 1.3MB and the document is 625k.

So now I'm really confused.  Do you know what determines whether an image is brought into Evernote as a .jpg or a .png?  I know if I become a premium user that I'll have a long time before I reach the monthly upload limit, but the one photo I took of 9 lines of handwritten notes resulted in a note that was 8MB.  And either my writing is really bad, or the OCR doesn't read .png files so it would be nice to understand how this works.

 

Thanks!

Carol

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  • Level 5*

Hi Carol

 

PNG and BMP picture files are full-fat hi-res images so will be (much) larger than JPG files which include some degree of compression - instead of recording lots of red pixels forinstance,  the file is coded for 400 x "red".  Kind've.

 

Sometimes you can specify which kind of picture file your camera will use,  other times the output is fixed;  so you need to aim for the applications / features that generate or allow you to specify JPG files for output.  Haven't tested whether PNG (or any other) picture files get OCR'd,  but I know that JPGs do (provided they're clear and large enough) so again that point is covered.

 

With photo vs document,  I'm guessing your camera sets a better resolution (more megapixels) for photos,  which you might want to print out larger ansd with lots of detail,  than to documents which are often two-colour and relatively small size.

 

-Again check which setting gives smaller JPGs and go with that one!

 

EDIT: bear in mind that you can always 'share' camera pictures to Evernote,  so if it's easier to manage you can just use your device camera to take pictures - more than one of the same page with different settings if necessary - so you can check which is smaller before you add it to a note.

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Other than my confusion over the picture formats, I like what I see of Evernote so decided to become a premium member.  For whatever reason, the EN camera app is now consistently taking .jpeg images of my handwritten notes.  At least now I can do some more experimenting without having to worry about the space limit.  Thanks for the suggestions!

 

Carol

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