Canon - What size file do you shoot in?

I have the Canon 7D I and shot some photos of a staff meeting. I posted them on our shared drive at the office and when we go to open them, it takes a long time to open. I looked at the size of the files and they are over 5,000 MB. Once they do open, they are really nice photos. I shoot RAW, then convert to JPEG in Lightroom. What file size should I shoot in so that the pictures are easier to open and look at??

Save as 80% jpg from LR.

5GB of photos? that's quite a bit of of photos there. How many photos did you export? Are you sure you exported them in JPEG? Are the RAWs also on that drive?

That's a good way to piss off the network engineer and bring your co-workers PCs to a crawl. If it is nothing fancy, try to export them at half the resolution, i am sure they don't need full res photos of a staff meeting and if they do then have the staff request it later or relocate the full res somewhere else and have staff copy the ones they want later.

Shoot raw at max file size. In lightroom, export them dependent on display device. If it's for web use there is rarely a need to have them larger than 1920x1080 and usually they can be much smaller. Compress them at maybe 5~7 and the resulting file sizes will be a few hundred k.

Bleufire wrote in post #18174600
5GB of photos? that's quite a bit of of photos there. How many photos did you export? Are you sure you exported them in JPEG? Are the RAWs also on that drive?

That's a good way to piss off the network engineer and bring your co-workers PCs to a crawl. If it is nothing fancy, try to export them at half the resolution, i am sure they don't need full res photos of a staff meeting and if they do then have the staff request it later or relocate the full res somewhere else and have staff copy the ones they want later.

Sorry, they are over 5,000KB, not MB.

As stated by gjl711. Your 7D shoots pictures with pixel dimensions of 5,184 × 3,456, and that is way more than can be displayed on anybody's monitor. During the export process in Lightroom, just limit the pixel dimensions of the exported JPG. Also, don't export at maximum JPG quality. Exporting at 70 or 80% is plenty - even 60% should be fine - and will greatly reduce file size.

anitaw2 wrote in post #18174617
Sorry, they are over 5,000KB, not MB.

Ok, so 5MB. doesn't sound horrid but again you don't want a ton of staff pulling a who series of 5MB files at one time from a folder off the shared drive.

When staff here have a picture folder with a bunch of personal photos on their networked drive, instead of their local, and then set the screen saver or desktop background to scroll through the album, it can beat up the network a bit.

Archibald wrote in post #18174626
As stated by gjl711. Your 7D shoots pictures with pixel dimensions of 5,184 × 3,456, and that is way more than can be displayed on anybody's monitor. During the export process in Lightroom, just limit the pixel dimensions of the exported JPG. Also, don't export at maximum JPG quality. Exporting at 70 or 80% is plenty - even 60% should be fine - and will greatly reduce file size.

Does quality reduce file size that much more over resolution?

gjl711 wrote in post #18174604
Shoot raw at max file size. In lightroom, export them dependent on display device. If it's for web use there is rarely a need to have them larger than 1920x1080 and usually they can be much smaller. Compress them at maybe 5~7 and the resulting file sizes will be a few hundred k.

^^^

It is NOT what resolution you shoot in, when shooting RAW. It IS what resolution you export the JPG file which is to be displayed to fit someone's modest monitor resolution..1920x1080

Bleufire wrote in post #18174629
Does quality reduce file size that much more over resolution?

Yes.

Windows seems to do one step forward, two steps back. From Windows XP, where you right clicked a photo and got a "resize" option, now you have to jump through hoops, especially with Win10.

If you just want to resize from Windows File Explorer download and install the Image Resizer from http://www.bricelam.ne​t/ImageResizer/. The utility has its "roots" from one of the old Microsoft Power Toys and works very well. After installing the tool, right-click on one or more selected picture files in File Explorer, then select Resize pictures.

This pic was exported from Lightroom at 1531x1080 pixels at 60% JPG quality, and looks fine to me. The size was 313 KB. Saving at other qualities gives the following sizes:

100% 1,377 KB
 90%   957 KB
 80%   663 KB
 70%   507 KB
 60%   313 KB.

The JPG quality achieves higher compression in part by taking 'similar colors' and substituting a single color in the encoding. It is more visible in effect in large expanses of 'continuous' color like a cloudless blue sky, where high compression can make bands of color apparent due to the color compression.

Not to detract from OP but then does this impact print then? I am assuming not.

Bleufire wrote in post #18174690
Not to detract from OP but then does this impact print then? I am assuming not.

Requirements for printing are much higher than for screen display.

Having done some quality tests on images exported from LR as JPEG files at each of the 13 actual compression levels, I no longer export JPEG files at anything above 80%/Q10 even for printing. At that level you are very hard pressed to measure the differences between a JPEG and the equivalent 8 bit TIFF file, let alone even see them. The advantage with using those levels of compression is that depending on the content you get between a 40% and 60% reduction in file size. If I really needed better than that for quality then I would just use TIFF/LZW since it will get you similar files sizes, while using loss less compression. One thing I noticed was that even at 100%/Q12 there is a measurable deviation between the JPEG and the TIFF file, since the JPEG encoding algorithm seems to cause artifacts no matter what.

Alan