Many times people want to know what is the equivalent size
of an image file in inches. In order to best know this you
need to find out how many pixels your image file is both in
width and height. Read this article to learn more and use this
tool developed by James Theopistos, one of our members and
an original
founder
of FinerWorks.com.
Finding Image's Width and Height in Pixels
If you
are on a Windows PC, this can be found by right clicking
an image file and selecting “Properties” then selecting
the “Summary” tab and left clicking the “Advanced” button.
Apple has made it much easier so if you are on a MAC, simply
right click the image file and select “Get Info”.
Your pixel dimensions show up under “dimensions” as ‘width
x height’.
Windows
MAC
Right click once on your image file
Select “Properties”
Selecting the “Summary” tab
Left
clicking the “Advanced” button
Right click once on your image file
Select “Get Info”
Note, with Windows, you will also see something called Horizontal
and Vertical Resolution. They refer to this as "DPI".
Don’t
worry about those numbers. Those numbers are set by your
camera,
scanner
or software. Also, sometimes you do not have to go through
all those steps and can get the pixel dimensions by just
hovering your mouse for a few seconds over your image file.
Deciding Pixel Per Inch (Resolution)
The next thing to do is determine a suitable number for “Pixels
Per Inch” or PPI. Most professionals will hover around
200 to 300 as a good number for print purposes. Some software
like web browsers use 72 as the PPI. For print, 72 is the
minimum
I recommend you will want to use and may still only
yield mediocre results. With that said, many times even
the professionals do not get much higher than that for
very large prints.
One thing to note is not to get PPI confused with “Dots
Per Inch” or DPI which people, including Bill Gates
thinks is the same. Just so you know, and I know
Windows
refers
to
it as DPI as mentioned above, DPI
is really the number of dots of ink a printer lays out
on paper or canvas. On the other hand, PPI is not set in
stone and can be changed. But if you change it, you also change the number of inches in width or height. I know
that some computer programs will still use DPI when referring
to
PPI so just understand that with a digital file, there
are not real “dots” but instead “pixels”.
If you like DPI and want to call pixels dots then go ahead
and no one (except maybe some MAC snobs I know) will get
too mad.
Easy Solution
Everything described above may seem somewhat technical.
If you are like me and not a big fan of math then a pixels
to inches converter will
help.
Therefore
to simplify things I have created this tool to figure out
what is an appropriate size based upon the total number
of pixels your image contains.
Article and tool provided courtesy of James Theopistos.
James is both a web programmer, photographer and digital
artist. He
is an original
founder
of FinerWorks
Media and he hates Windows and OS X. As a matter of fact he
hates computers period but sees them as a necessary evil.
