Optimizing and Organizing Your Image Files for Your PSP

Although it's a wonderful device, the PSP has limitations. One limitation: Images that are larger than the screen's pixel resolution are automatically downsampled (reduced in size, retaining as much image detail as possible). That's because the screen is only so many pixels, and most photographs contain more than that number.

Also, like other media files, the PSP demands that you store photos in a certain folder on your Memory Stick Duo. With some smart organization on your computer's hard drive, you can make the process of transferring photos to and from your PSP simple.

Tweaking Photos for the PSP

Depending on which version of the instruction booklet came with your PSP, there's a cryptic "hint" in the Photo section that states, "Images edited using a PC may not be viewable on the PSP system."

Exactly why that's there puzzles me. I've edited roughly half the photos currently on my PSP, using my PC, and they all display just fine. Because most photos are in a different aspect ratio from the PSP's screen (photos normally are 4:3, whereas the PSP screen is 16:9), the PSP displays the full photograph with blank bars wherever there wasn't enough photo data to fill the screen (Figure 9.1)sort of like the way widescreen movies on a standard TV have those black bars above and below them.

Figure 9.1. A photo that's not in the PSP's native 16:9 aspect ratio doesn't get cropped; it gets buffered with blank bars on each side.

The PSP's native pixel resolution is 480x272, which means that it won't display more dots than 480 across and 272 down, even if your photo is a 4 MB whopper at 3000x2000 or something. Your best bet is to crop, downsample, or otherwise reduce the photo's resolution to something more suitable to the PSP's capabilities, for two reasons:

• Photos larger than the PSP's native resolution take up way more space on the Memory Stick Duo than is necessary.

• Because the PSP has to downsample large photos to show them on its screen, big photos take longer to load than those closer to the native screen resolution.

So let's say you have an application like Adobe Photoshop Elements or Corel's Paint Shop Pro. You can use it to crop imagesin other words, cut out parts of them that you don't really needand to resize them.

If you don't have such an app, you can reduce photo size by using some freebie utility such as Microsoft's unsupported Image Resizer PowerToy for Windows XP, available at www.microsoft.com/windowsxp/downloads/powertoys/xppowertoys.mspx. If you have a Mac, there's probably something similar around somewhere.

To reduce image size in an application like Photoshop Elements, follow these steps:

1.	Load the photo you want to edit (Figure 9.2). Figure 9.2. Using Photoshop Elements 3.0, I've loaded an image I snapped of a future big-league star (the kid in the orange shirt).
2.	Check the photo's pixel dimensions. You can view this information in anything that lets you see the file properties or metadata; check the File menu for a Properties option.
3.	If the image is more than 480 pixels across or 272 pixels down, you should reduce its size. If the image has lots of extraneous stuff that you don't need, crop the image, using the photo-editing software's crop tool to center on the primary subject and lose the unnecessary extras (Figure 9.3). Figure 9.3. There's lots of empty space in the photo (which currently is 3008x2000 pixels), so I crop out the unneeded stuff.
4.	After cropping, check the image properties again. Is the image still larger than 480x272? If so, resize it, using the software's resize tool. Resize it by pixel dimensions (not by real-world dimensions such as inches or centimeters), reducing it to 480 pixels across (Figure 9.4). Figure 9.4. Even after cropping, the image was huge, so I resized it to 480 pixels across. Even if the image isn't exactly 480x272, as long as it's close to those dimensions, it'll be OK.
5.	Save the image.

When you transfer an image to your PSP and display it, there still may be white bars across the top or on the sides of the image. The PSP is displaying the whole image, but because it's a different shape (perhaps longer or taller than the PSP's aspect ratio allows), the PSP compensates with blank areas of its screen (Figure 9.5).

Figure 9.5. If an image is not in an exact 16:9 aspect ratio, the PSP will fill empty space with ... empty space.

Organizing Photos on Your Hard Drive and the PSP

As is the case with audio files, the PSP demands that you stick your photos and other images in a certain folder on the Memory Stick Duo, and although you can organize your stuff with subfolders, you can use only one level of subfolders. The PSP utterly ignores subfolders within subfolders, and it won't find image files in any location other than the proper folder (Figure 9.6), which is:

<root>\PSP\Photo\

Figure 9.6. This is the proper location on the PSP (here, my E drive) for photos. Note the subfolders. If I create more folders within those subfolders, the PSP will ignore them.

If you followed my suggestion for organizing your music (Chapter 8) and created a folder in your computer's C drive called PSP, create a folder within that folder called Photo. The path would be C:\PSP\Photo.

After you edit or resize/downsample photographs for your PSP, stick them in that folder. When you're ready to transfer the images to your PSP, simply copy/cut and paste them, or drag and drop them, to your PSP's Memory Stick Duo, following the instructions in Chapter 6.