Vive la resolution!

The news that Instacanvas has raised a pile of money reminded me about resolution. A while back I wrote about losing pixels when you take photos from the iCloud. Instacanvas, like other Insta spin-offs, connects up with Instagram and takes the images from their servers. Blurb does something similar and, having printed a book with Blurb myself, I know what a seamlessly easy process it is thanks to that bridge to Instagram. But whenever you move your photos anywhere, keep an eye on the numbers. A great little app to help you do this is Lab. It tells you the number of pixels you’ve got and your file size. 

And have you guessed already what happens to a photo when you upload it to Instagram? Yes. You lose pixels. About half of them sometimes. Which means that any app that pulls your photos from Instagram’s servers is pulling down a lower-resolution version than the one sitting on your phone. And Instacanvas are proposing to turn those photos into prints of up to 20 inches square to put on your bedroom wall. So those pixels get stretched and have to work hard not to look like something out of legoland.

But does it matter that much? Some time ago, I manually printed off some photos from my old 3G phone with a size of 8 inches square and I put them on my bedroom wall. And they look OK. With all the roughing up of the images that I did, I don’t think you can tell. So one part of me says “hold onto your pixels!” but another says ” yeah, no big deal, unless you’ve the eyesight of a hawk, you won’t notice”. So good luck to Instacanvas, let’s get some more of our lovely iphoneography on our bedroom walls.

If you’re gonna put a picture on the wall…