Sending Images in the Proper Size
If we are to evaluate your pre or post-operative photos, it is important that they be good enough that we can see what we need in order to give you an accurate opinion about your pilonidal situation. It is important that the photos:
- Are in sharp focus.
- Show the proper area of concern.
- Are taken with adequate lighting.
- Are in high resolution, which translates to a large enough file size.
One of the more common and frustrating problems is that although you take the photo with your phone camera as a high resolution file, when you email it to us, it is too small for us to evaluate. To give you an idea of the magnitude of this difference, the original photo might be 2500 KB, yet the photo comes through at 25 KB – a thousand times smaller than the original. We don’t necessarily need photos that are 2500KB – sometimes 500KB will be adequate — but other times we need to zoom in to see detail, which requires the full size image.
How to troubleshoot this problem
There isn’t just one answer to why this is happening because we are dealing with many kinds of hardware (iPhones, Android phones, desktop computers), operating systems (Apple IOS, Windows, etc), email clients (programs that send your email), and email servers (the company that manages your internet). And, like most computer problems, the biggest hurdle is often just figuring out which of these is the culprit.
However, the most fruitful place to look first is your email program and how you are using it, and make sure that when you send the email that:
- The images are “attached” to the email, not “embedded” in the text of the email itself.
- If there is a dialogue that asks you if you want to send the image size as Small, Medium, Large or Actual Size – that you pick Actual Size. Note: That with some programs, if you selected “Small” when sending some other email, it may retain that setting for all future emails, so see if you can change this.
It may take some trial and error to figure this out, and rather than repeatedly attempting to send us the photos, please either try sending them to yourself, or a family member, download the photo, and look at it’s size and see if you can send it in adequate size. In order to know if it is big enough:
iPhone: If you have an image in your Camera Roll of an iPhone, and swipe up on the image, you will see information about the photo. It might say something like: 12MP – 3024 x 4032 – 3.3 MB. This is a full size photo from an iPhone 15. If the numbers are similar, this is a full size image. If you see something like 0.3 MP – 480 x 640 – 32 KB, it is too small.
Android Phone: In the photo gallery, if you open a photo and tap on the circle with three dots at the top and select “Details”, “Info”, or “More Info”, it should show you similar information as described on the iPhone.
Hopefully this will help troubleshoot the problem. If you’re still having trouble, let us know.