I have not chosen the word resolution thinking of the commitment people make to themselves at the beginning of each new year as a way to begin my activities in this forum. But rather the word's application to photography both digital and analog. I do so because it has come to my attention"resolution" in the digital realm is so very often misunderstood by photographers because the use of the word applied to the traditional film photographic process is not the same reality the word resolution refers to digitally.
Resolution as a term applied to the analog photographic process refers to how finely optics and film can resolve information recorded by the process. Generally this attribute is referred to as sharpness, and is sometimes qualified by terms like acutance and definition of the visual information that can be recorded by a lens and film.
However, a digital image is not a physical thing but just recorded numeric information that describes pixels, discrete pieces of information that is a matrix that reproduces an image made up of many, many of these individual discrete pixels. Resolution in digital specifications refers to the number of pixels which make up the matrix of pixels that is a digital photograph. In other words rather than describing a qualitative attribute of a photograph it defines the size of the image, like 2000x3000 pixels or 6 megapixels referring to the total area size.
So digital resolution, in megapixels, is really more synomous with film format size functionally. And although, like a larger film format that can record more gross information and thereby create a "sharper" image if all things are equal, a higher megapixel count will also record more information and reproduce a "sharper" image; but in both cases this is a derivative similarity, and that's where the sameness of meaning between analog and digital 'resolution' ends.
So I would suggest that you don't automatically assume the term resolution means the same in digital photography as it does in the world of film photography.

.jpg)

.jpg)

