Share slide photos as a 1 MB handout

The workshop wall, captured

Saturday's workshop ends with six flipchart sheets full of marker writing, photographed as flipchart-01.jpg through flipchart-06.jpg, and the attendees want something to take home. Twelve loose megabytes in a group chat will be ignored; one tidy file under a megabyte gets opened on the train.

Six pages share 1,048,576 bytes at about 170 KB each, which reads well projected and prints fine two-up. Assemble them with JPG to PDF and squeeze the file at the 1 MB compress target. Any room laptop opens the result with no special software.

How the megabyte splits

One megabyte is the whole file's allowance, not each page's. Plan the set before building: fewer pages per file beats a thin spread across too many. A 2 MB target doubles every number above for longer sets.

Where handouts go wrong

• The mail trap. A 1 MB file travels as roughly 1.3 MB once mail encodes it, bouncing off a hard 1 MB cap. A 500 KB target is the mail-safe answer.
• Twenty slides in one file. Each gets 50 KB and the projector shows it. Split long workshops into two handouts.
• Wall in the frame. Budget spent on plaster is stolen from marker writing. Crop every capture to the board.
• Shrinking photos first. Assembly decides the final weight, so early shrinking wastes effort. Build first, squeeze second.

From captures to handout

1. Capture and crop. Photograph each sheet square and cut to the board on the phone. Even light keeps marker strokes clean.
2. Assemble the PDF. Open the images to PDF tool, drop the captures in, order them as the day ran, and pick a page size. Original JPG data lands on the pages untouched.
3. Squeeze to 1 MB. Take the assembled file to the 1 MB compress target. It works the document down and checks the result before handing it back.
4. Project-test it. Open the file full-screen and read the back-row slides yourself. If you can read them, so can the room.

When the browser is not the answer

When the slides exist as files, export the deck to PDF instead of photographing the screen. A photo of a projection is a copy of a copy; the exported pages stay sharp at any size and weigh less.

When the session must be replayed rather than skimmed, still photos will not do. Record the whiteboard as video and share the handout beside it. For plain photo sets of any shape, the compress tool handles the squeeze.