Suggested Image Size

Well I was wondering, what size do you guys suggest should I use for my collection of images? I am NOT a proffesional photographer, I just take a lot of photos of my family and on vacations. The size my camera saves my pictures is 2273 x 1704. The problem is that it sometimes takes quite some time to see a thumbnail of the image, and opening it also takes some time. What size should I resize it to? I still want to have good photo quality, but in a smaller size so the images would load faster. Thanks! :biohazard

I don't about what size to resize your photos to, but you should definitely save the originals somewhere else. A few years ago, I tweaked all the family vacation photos, and now that I look at them, they all look like crap. So just be a little cautious.

Any other suggestions?

You have to consider if you want prints of your photos or not, i guess thats the most important factor to keep them in the biggest size possible. If you dont plan on printing them i would suggest you to keep your photos on the next size of your monitor resolution, example, if your monitor works on 1024x768 keep them on 1280x960, in that way you will get great quality watching them on full screen or if you ever want to use them as a wallpaper or screen saver, with a chance to crop. Keep an eye on quality also, keep it over 80% of compression. Im sure you can choose the resolution of the photos in your camera, choose smaller size but better quality.
Still, i allways keep my photos in the original size and almost all in the original state. Something else that is not what you ask for is change the program you use to view/organize your photos, some are faster some are slower. If you use iPhoto and still want to reduce your pictures look for iPhoto Diet on VersionTracker.

I usually take all my pictures at 2048x1536 then those are my originals, then I use something like iWatermark and batch resize them for whatever purpose I need.. like the web for example.

If you're having problems loading thumbnails of pics, you can create thumbnails with a batch program to find the pic you want, then keep all of the originals in another folder that has the file preview turned off (just shows file name) to keep load times down. If you have the hard drive space, I'd try to keep originals since you never know what you may want or need them for down the road. Unless I'm shooting RAW (which is rare), I always shoot Large JPEG Fine (largest res, lowest compression), since it gives you more to work with later in PS.

Whatever you do, burn the originals to CD first. There is know greater fustration in reducing or cropping picture and them realizing a month down the road you need the original. If you save the original, 1280x960 would be fine for most uses but if you ever needed them bigger, you got them.