Picktorial - Best practice for exporting photos

Best practice for exporting photos

Exporting photos from a photo editor usually means one of two things: Either you are ready to share your work, or you want to make further edits in different software.

This intention - to “frame or edit” - drives most important decisions when exporting photos. In this post we will go through the export process and learn how to choose the export parameters that best fit your purpose.

First is the export destination: If you are ready to share your work with the world, you will probably want to choose one of the sharing options (e.g. Facebook, Flickr, Twitter and so on). In this case, Picktorial will optimize the image for sharing and you can focus on writing creative text to accompany your photo and set other parameters specific to the platform (e.g. Who can see you photo on Facebook).

Alternatively, you can export your photos to a folder. In this case you can accept the recently used settings, or set parameters again based on your current need.

First and foremost is the folder destination. This can be whatever folder you prefer, but if you export to make further edits in a different software we recommend structuring folders based on a consistent workflow (e.g. RAWs/ProccessedRAWs/). At any rate, make sure to use a different folder than the one containing your original photos to avoid an accidental override of the originals.

TIFF or JPEG?

If you are exporting with the purpose of further editing your photo in another photo editor, then you should go with TIFF, for reasons we’ll explain below. If you’re done with editing and just want want to export your photo for viewing and sharing purposes, choose JPEG.

TIFF Quality

When you export a file in TIFF, Picktorial always uses the ProPhoto RGB color space. Since Linear ProPhoto RGB is Picktorial’s own working color space (and also used by other photo editors like Adobe Lightroom® and Photoshop® Adobe Camera RAW), this is the only reasonable choice for minimizing loss of quality when passing photos between photo editors via TIFF files. The receiving photo editor should be able to read the TIFF in this file format and convert it to its own working color space - possibly in a higher bit-depth.

JPEG Quality

When you export as JPEG, you can trade off between file size and image quality regardless of image resolution. If the quality is too low, then blocking artifacts appears and fine details are lost. If a small file-size is important for you, we recommend that you experiment with different values for this parameter until you are satisfied with the result. This may vary based on the image content, but values that give a good balance between file size and quality will probably be found between 50 and 90.

Image Resolution

Here you can set the longest of the output image width and height to be smaller or equal to a specific number of pixels. This will only downscale the image if needed, while preserving its aspect ratio.

Preserving GPS Location

When exporting an image, Picktorial preserves most of its metadata. If privacy is a concern, you can discard geographic location from the output.

We tried hard to keep the export process as clean as possible, eliminating any uncertainty when setting parameters and making the process as straightforward as possible. As always, we would really love to hear your constructive feedback, and if you have any ideas as to how to make the export process even better, let us know, either here as a comment on this post or in via email to contact@picktorial.com.

P.S. In this tutorial, we assumed the standalone version of Picktorial. When you use Picktorial as an editing extension for macOS Photos, use the export functionality that Apple provides in Photos.