I figured out how to make it smaller within photobucket, but I think the quality isn't as good. Let's compare:
{{gwi:172613}}

It is a beautiful bird in both photos! You are going full tilt with some great birds lately!

WOW!! You are doing much better than I ever did with that lens, you must be getting pretty close to have the bird fill up that much of the picture!

If you are trying to upload the original picture than you are uploading over 3 megabytes - that's huge! My pictures are typically 200 kilobytes which is about 1/15th the size of yours.

Heres a quickie explanation of how to trim and compress the picture in zoombrowser (not the best tool but it should make a difference). Unfortunately I couldn't find a way to resize the picture but hoping trimming it and compressing it will help considerably.

In Zoombrowser, double-click on the picture

On the edit menu, select "Trim" - this will open it in another window. First make sure the window is maximized, I don't think it defaults to that. Put the crosshair (the cursor) in the top left corner where you want to trim. Holding the mouse button down, drag the crosshair to the bottom right corner. When you have the box drawn, release the mouse button and click on the "Trim image" box on the right. When you are done trimming, click on "OK" (the "OK" button is at the bottom of the screen and doesn't show if the screen is not maximized). When you click "OK" you will return to the Zoombrowser window.

Click on "File" and then on "Save As". Pick the folder where you want to save the picture and change the name (it's always a good idea to save it somewhere else with a different name in case you want to retain the original). Change the quality slider (at the bottom), I would try medium or high first and see how big the file is, I would avoid low.

Thats the basics - so give it a try, you can do this!

Thanks Comet and jeanner.........I'll try that later after my doctor visit.
So is the main problem that I'm trying to upload a picture that's just too big, or is it my dial-up, or maybe both?
How do professional photographer's do it, when they have even more pixels? Do they have software that lets them compress it or is there some feature on their camera that does it before they upload it?

Will the compression always decrease the quality a little?

Now that my son has gone to college, I need to learn some things.......like how to use my camera, and how to use the computer! That would be fun.
As always, thanks for your help jeanner!

You're doing great with the camera, Catherine! You'll get the hang of editing, don't worry. And it will make uploading and sharing your pics SO much more enjoyable for you! :)

Brenda

Thanks for the encouragement Brenda!

Catherine, I think it's primarily the size of the file that is the problem. If you can get the size down to 200kb or less it should upload in less than a minute on a 56k modem. Most of my pictures are 200kb or less. Even the professionals compress pictures that are to be viewed on a monitor. Due to the nature of monitors (unless you have a very, very expensive monitor) you will notice little difference in the picture before and after compressing it. Printing is a different matter, than you want to retain the um-compressed image. I usually save it without compression first (I use .tif format but thats a lesson for another day) and then save it compressed for the web.

For viewing the picture on the web, I also resize the picture, usually to a width of 900 pixels, much larger than that and it forces those viewing it to have to scroll back and forth. It appears that Photobucket resizes the image for you but that is after your painful wait for it to upload.

SO the basic steps are crop (or trim), resize and then compress. I can't seem to find a place in Zoombrowser to resize though and looking at your redstart picture that even after you trim it is going to be about half the original picture (I'm still amazed at how close you got to that bird!!!) which would be about 2000 pixels wide.

Do you have any other software, maybe Picture Manager that comes with Microsoft Office tools?

Heres a comparison of the same picture using different amounts of compression ...

This first picture is 400 kb ...

{{gwi:172616}}

This picture is 100 kb ....

{{gwi:172620}}

Can you see much difference?