Working with Images
One of the biggest problems non-graphic artists have when learning to maintain their websites is the whole issue of working with their images. Web 2.0 sites really rock with photos and images to demonstrate a topic or can be used in a long blog post to break up text into manageable sized chunks.
Image File Types and Purpose
It helps to know a bit about file types. If you don’t know your JPEGs from your GIFs image formats, this is for you. First, lets talk about file compression.
There are basically two ways of saving images, lossy or lossless (no, I didn’t make those up). If an image is saved in a lossy image format, it means the format being used discards some of the “unimportant” image information. However, the resulting image file is smaller. Lossless retains ALL the image information. OK, now that you know that, here’s a overview of the [click to continue…]
Many of you have lots of photos in your computer files and find that they are too large to quickly upload to your website. The first thing you can do to help with the problem is to adjust the settings of your camera. Most cameras these days can take pictures that are Ginormous. Unless you are a professional or want to use photos for large prints you can adjust your cameras to a smaller resolution. But if you want to keep your pixels huge then I have another fast solution.
Download the free program Picture Resizer. It is an easy way to re-size your jpgs.
How to use it?
- Download PhotoResize400.exe and place it on your desktop.
- Open Windows Explorer to your photo files.
- Select the photo or the entire file that you would like the photos re-sized and drag and drop JPG files or folders with JPG files on to the the application icon on your desktop.
- The tool will re-size JPG images and save them next to the originals. Names of the new pictures will be based on the original names, with a suffix indicating their size. For example, the re-sized version of MyPhoto.jpg will be called MyPhoto-400.jpg, where the number 400 indicates the size of the picture.
On the program home page there are choices you can make about the way you want the photos re-sized. These choices are changed in your program by renaming the program icon on your desktop. Just go to the desktop and right click and change the name to whichever choice you’d like to make. I used the one that makes the maximum width 400 px and keeps the proportions of the original photo.
Images are an important component to a good blog post. They give a reader a first hint of what the article is about and they can set the tone. Using a visual can break up the text in posts that may otherwise feel too long and they just add a bit of polish to a post and to the site.
