On a different note, the photographer said she trashed the originals, so you have no other choices. You can always print one single picture and see the result.Taken from one of the many website reporting this table, here is a list of common DPI numbers you can use a starting point for your decisions:
What's the next step? Well, pick your quality!Īs I wrote most of it comes from your own expectations, but you can always start with some "scientific evidence". I used 300 DPI 'cause is a way common number when it comes to high quality printing, but that's not a magic number. So at 300 DPI, for example, you can print your pictures at a size of 7x5 inches. Let's take a 2084x1528 pixels image and print it at 300 DPI.
The magic word in printing is "DPI", which stands for "dot per inches" this is a measure of how many "points" we fit in a inches when printing. So here it comes some starting point, to at least have a rough measurement just remember nobody can measure your expectations :-) Well, quality is way subjective, and on top of it it depends not only from the size of the print but from the distance you plan to look at them. That said, as everyone wrote, the size of the picture itself is not a straight index of quality: most image formats perform some kind of compression, which means they use a plethora of mathematical algorithms to store a bigger quantity of information in a smaller file this can happens by trading off the quality of the picture, and on the other hand it heavily depends on the information stored in the picture itself, so sometime you can happen to have a small file with an high quality image or a big file with a poor quality image.įinally, all cleared, let's come to the core of the question: will you get decent enough prints from this picture? While it's true that you can measure the size of a file both in KB and in MB, in this context you clearly mean "the pictures are less than one megabyte" As some other answers have already pointed out the measure unit means nothing in itself, although it's obvious in this context that you meant something entirely different.