Non-Governmental Imagination

I promised to never blog from work since Interplast donors aren’t paying me to keep this blog, but I’m really stumped here.

We need photos from all of our international partners for our annual report, and they keep sending me photos with web-optimized (72 dpi) resolutions.  300 dpi is about the lowest you can go to have decent print quality.  Our partners don’t really understand what I’m asking for and why what they’re giving me isn’t working.

The partners come from a wide swath of countries (India, Sri Lanka, Nicaragua, Ghana, etc.) that don’t have much in common with each other.  Most use straight-outta-the-box Windows machines and whatever photo software accompanies their digital cameras.

My hunch is that something they are doing is automatically changing the resolution to make the file size smaller.  Has anyone experienced similar issues dealing with non-techies in the developing world?  I’d love any advice as to how to proceed.