This page created 1 Sep 2014
Hosted by Terry's TMG Tips
In TMG, on the Chart Options > Images tab, a chart may have the primary person image placed at the top left or top right or not placed at all in the person box. This adds variation, color and interest to the chart.
But it does come at a cost. A chart with embedded person images actually holds all those images in uncompressed bit map form. The saved .VC2 can quickly become several 100Mb. If you try to edit the chart any action will take possibly 20 to 100 times longer as all that extra data has to be collected and managed.
This refers to at what size the image will be displayed on the chart. Typically a bounding rectangle 60 * 60 pixels (about 5/8 inch, 16 mm) to 100 * 100 pixels (about 1 inch, 26 mm) is used. The image is zoomed to best fit maintaining the aspect ratio to fit in this space. Some persons will have images, some will not. The catch is that TMG only allows one box width to hold the text and the image. So the box width needs to be expanded to allow sufficient space for the text when an image is present. Boxes without images are the same width as the boxes with images. This means that the chart will be much wider with images than one without images. In some instances, where images are only available for the last few generation it may be better to generate 2 charts one without images, and the other for the last generations with images and then combine them for printing (See Combining Charts)
The image digital size is not the file size, but the width in pixels, and the height in pixels. Using a 3000 * 2000 pixel image to print an image in a one inch square is information overload.
A very good image would be 50,000 pixels in total, or 8% percent of the size. So don’t use raw phone or digital camera images, or high resolution scan images. That is a waste. It also takes longer to print such charts.
A number of popular free downloadable tools are available to do the required operations. I prefer to use Irfanview. Firstly, you should crop the image to use the space more efficiently.
Then to reduce the number of pixels further, the image should be re-sampled down to a version with fewer pixels. This is not the same as changing the compression percentage for a JPG.
Use the Image > Resize / Resample in Irfanview.
Irfanview will open most image formats, and it will also convert between them.
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