It is helpful to look at common data transfer rates in order to form reasonable expectations of network speeds. Such an image will fill a 13 inch Macintosh display, exactly. On the other hand, the same image could fly across an ethernet network in less than 1 second. Keep in mind that these rates actually only occur under optimal network conditions. So, the more data you have, the longer it takes to transfer it across a network.
Digital images are extremely data intensive.
It is not too uncommon for an image to exceed 30 MB of data. Luckily, there are a number of ways to reduce the amount of data needed to represent an image. The most effective data reducing techniques come at the cost of image quality. But in many situations it is not necessary for an image to meet the highest quality standards. This is especially true when the primary use of the image will be for display on a computer screen.