displaying pictures

[Guest]

I have a linked OLE picture that when it loads, it is real distorted. The
colors are messed up and just looks terrible. This is just how it is
displayed on my form. It happened when I changed the picture's size mode from
clip to zoom. When its in clip mode we have to save the picture with the size
that is displayed on the form which we don't want to do. Is there anyway to
make the picture look better? The pictures are bitmaps. Also does windows
come with a program that will compress the size of bitmaps pictures? If not
do you know of any free programs? The pictures are larger than I want around
300+ kbs

 

[Guest]

Dan, check out my website, under Downloads, and get the Irfanview program.
It has an image resizer that will do the trick.

Destin Richter
(e-mail address removed)
www.tribal-software.com

 

[Larry Linson]

"Dan" wrote

I have a linked OLE picture that
when it loads, it is real distorted. The
colors are messed up and just looks
terrible. This is just how it is displayed
on my form. It happened when I
changed the picture's size mode from
clip to zoom. When its in clip mode
we have to save the picture with the size
that is displayed on the form which we
don't want to do. Is there anyway to
make the picture look better? The pictures
are bitmaps. Also does windows come
with a program that will compress the
size of bitmaps pictures? If not do you
know of any free programs? The pictures
are larger than I want around
300+ kbs

Access does not include image file conversion capability and the only
compression of bitmaps of which I am aware makes them no longer displayable
until they have been decompressed. As Destin mentioned, there are many
third-party programs available to do image file conversion, some of which
provide significant compression. Some popular file formats with compression
are JPG, GIF, and PNG for color images and certain versions of TIFF for
monochrome images. 300 KB is a realtively modest size for a bitmap image,
but you can certainly compress it, with appropriate software, into a
different file format.

If you are storing even a compressed image as an OLE Object, you may be
paying a price in storage, because a bitmap thumbnail is created and stored,
too. See the following for alternatives:

The sample imaging databases at http://accdevel.tripod.com illustrate three
approaches to handling images in Access, and the download includes an
article discussing considerations in choosing an approach. Two of the
approaches do not use OLE Objects and, thus, avoid the database bloat, and
some other problems, associated with images in OLE Objects.

If you are printing the images in reports, to avoid memory leakage, you
should also see MVP Stephen Lebans' http://www.lebans.com/printfailures.htm.
PrintFailure.zip is an Access97 MDB containing a report that fails during
the Access formatting process prior to being spooled to the Printer Driver.
This MDB also contains code showing how to convert the contents of the Image
control to a Bitmap file prior to printing. This helps alleviate the "Out of
Memory" error that can popup when printing image intensive reports.

Larry Linson
Microsoft Access MVP