High Low definition photos

**Peebs24** · 03 June 2018, 01:23 AM

When I drag a photo into a page I sometimes get a message saying "This photo is high definition. Do you want to import at reduced definition" - or words to that effect!
My question is .............. What is the lower definition (dpi)? Are they good enough for printing?
Regards,

**gwpriester** · 03 June 2018, 01:29 AM

No. For printing you want at least 300dpi.

Now this is for commercial printing. If you are printing from a desktop printer then experiment and see from which dpi you can get the best results. 96 or 150 might be fine for a desktop printer.

**Peebs24** · 03 June 2018, 01:54 AM

Originally Posted by gwpriester

No. For printing you want at least 300dpi.

Now this is for commercial printing. If you are printing from a desktop printer then experiment and see from which dpi you can get the best results. 96 or 150 might be fine for a desktop printer.

Thanks Gary. By the way - what is the lower definition in dpi? Is there any way of checking whether I have dragged in the original high def or selected the low def? Could save me replacing a lot of photos!!!!
Regards

**gwpriester** · 03 June 2018, 12:46 PM

I am not sure how this feature works. Except that some of the resolution depends on the physical size Xara reduces large photos.

For example, I have a photo that is 850px wide at 300dpi. I dragged it from the desktop into Xara. If I being it in at the Original Size it comes in at 800px (my setting for imported photos) at 319dpi. At Reduced it comes in at 800px width and at 230dpi.

I am sure that those who are good at maths can tell me what is going on here. But the images definitely are not set to 96dpi if you chose the Reduced size.

**Acorn** · 03 June 2018, 03:20 PM

I retain full control as I bring my images into a Blank Photo Xara template so the original dimensions are retained.
The image is 96 dpi so scaling to 32% gives an image at 300 dpi.

It is then a case of copy & paste.

Acorn

**Peebs24** · 03 June 2018, 07:28 PM

Originally Posted by gwpriester

I am not sure how this feature works. Except that some of the resolution depends on the physical size Xara reduces large photos.

For example, I have a photo that is 850px wide at 300dpi. I dragged it from the desktop into Xara. If I being it in at the Original Size it comes in at 800px (my setting for imported photos) at 319dpi. At Reduced it comes in at 800px width and at 230dpi.

I am sure that those who are good at maths can tell me what is going on here. But the images definitely are not set to 96dpi if you chose the Reduced size.

Thanks Gary - you are a mine of information!
Now for your next trick .......... is there any way of clicking on an imported photo and seeing what resolution it has? A bit like 'Properties....'? If not, it would be a good addition!
Regards,

**ss-kalm** · 04 June 2018, 02:23 AM

The status bar at the bottom should tell you the dpi and the infobar should give you it's size (i.e the status bar should say 1 photo "TITLE" (327 dpi) or whatever and the info bar should show W - 13.33in H - 10", or again whatever).

**Scotty** · 04 June 2018, 05:17 AM

Hi,
If you got to windows file manager to the directory where the photo resides and select the Photo and go to properties it would give that information for you if it is from a source other than a screen capture as that is dependent on windows resolution which would be 96dpi or on a Mac 72dpi I believe.

**hseiken** · 17 June 2018, 05:07 AM

DPI and pixels are inherently against one another and I hope in the future it all goes towards DPI. Pixels are for screens and don't mesh with the real world, but monitor resolutions are now of such high density (read high dpi, even though its ppi: pixels per inch vs. dots per inch) that monitors hopefully will start being less about resolution and start being more about ppi/dpi and size, exactly how printing works.

That said, DPI doesn't matter on a screen. You essentially have to pay attention to the resolution itself. On a piece of paper, 300 dpi means literally 300 pixels per inch in picture terms. If you have an 800x800 picture, then that's easy to calculate in inches (or metric for my brothers and sisters in more sane countries), then you simply take the resolution and divide it by the target output DPI: 800/300 x 800x300. So that would be in inches 2 2/3x 2/3 inches. Assuming that you're printing at 300 dpi.

Hopefully that's not too confusing, I kind of suck at explaining things some times, but it gets really tricky when the formats we work with are doing everything in their power to ignore everyone else working with the same material and want to call dibs on how we are supposed to define them, so I say blame everyone else for making it complicated, blame me for failing to uncomplicate it!

**handrawn** · 17 June 2018, 07:13 AM

the mistake is to think of dpi as being a unit of size - it is not, it is a unit of density

the size of an image is how many pixels it is hight and width.

dpi defines how those pixels are spread out on the device, specifically a printer; and as you say.. monitors are different because you cannot change the distance between pixels on the fly, for a given screen resolution that spacing is fixed