Digital Photo Tips - Preparing Photo For the Web
By Grady Pruitt
I love taking pictures with my digital camera. I can take as many pictures as I want. If I don't like a picture, I can delete it without ever printing it. And when I want to add a picture onto my computer, all I have to do is download it from the camera.
But when it comes time to share the photo on my website, I have to choose how I want to do that. There are two basic methods people use to post photos in their pages. One of the most common ways is to create a small, thumbnail image that can be created as a link to the full size image. If you have a lot of space on the server hosting your web page, this might be feasible for you.
The method I prefer is to simply resize my image to a smaller size -- one that can allow visitors to see the details in the image, yet be small enough to quickly download.
Image editing programs, such as Photoshop and the Gimp make this an easy task, though for a lot of photos, this method can be time consuming. I find the option for changing the image size or scale in the menu. My personal preference is to set the size of the image to 320 x 240. For my particular camera, this is one of those mathematically "perfect" resize points. This size provides enough details to see what the image is about while still being fast to download. Also, I can usually fit 2 of these images side by side in a 800 pixel wide setting I generally use in my web pages.
To create a thumbnail sized image, I would recommend scaling the image down to 10% or less. You could also crop the image and scale the cropped image down to a smaller size. The trick here is to create enough interest to make visitors click to see the full size image.
If you have a lot of images to resize, you might check out the batch processing capabilities of your image program. Batch processing can make the job of resizing a lot of images much faster and easier when they are being sized to the same settings.
One of the disadvantages of the thumbnail images is that you not only need to have space for the large image, but you also need space for the thumbnails. While the thumbnails may be quite small, the larger images can take up a lot of space. The thumbnails can help your web page load faster, but with the larger photos also on your web server, you could run out of space fast.
Getting your images ready to post can take a while if you have a lot of images to process, but the process is easy to do. Just remember to save the image into a different file to preserve the original image for future use.
Are you looking for more tips to get the most out of your computer? Check out Grady Pruitt's blog, The Computer Screen
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