Sorry if this is a little bit off-topic, but it might help a frequent problem I see here. Moderators, feel free to move this if necessary.
When reading posts that would benefit from an image I often read something like the following:
"I've got pictures, but I don't know how to post them (or, they are too big and I can't make them smaller), can I email them to someone and have them do it?"
I've helped a few people out, and I'm always happy to do so as my little contribution, but I thought I'd post a few suggestions for people who'd like to learn a little more and be able to do it themselves.
Your digital camera
Your digital camera takes very high resolution pictures. Resolution is defined as the number of pixels (individual dots of color) it takes to make up the image. If your camera has a shiny sticker on the side that says something like, "2 mega pixels" or "5.1 MP" or something, it is telling you how many millions of pixels will be used to create each image. The higher the number the sharper the image.
Thats all well and good for printing, when you need as many pixels as possible. However, on the web, far fewer pixels are necessary for a good picture.
Your digital camera also takes pictures at various quality levels, usually labeled in the settings as, "High Quality, Medium Quality, Economy" or something like that. Each of those settings determines how 'compressed' an image is. The computer can lower the quality of the image by a bit, which lets the computer 'guess' some of the pixels, instead of having to store their exact color. This means the same image, with the same number of pixels, can be held in a smaller amount of space, with the sacrifice of a bit of quality.
When printing, you want very high quality (or low 'compression'). But on the web, a certain amount of compression is very handy to speed up downloading times.
Your computer
When you transfer an image off the camera onto the computer, you may notice the file size, perhaps a few hundred kilobytes up to several megabytes. These 'fresh' images are great for printing, but bad for the web, which is why if you attempt to attach these images to a post, you'll get an error!
You need to use some software to make the image smaller (less pixels) and higher compression (for a smaller file size).
There is a lot of software that can do this for you, from Adobe Photoshop and ImageReady on the professional end, to various pieces of freeware. You can find a lot that will help you, but my favorite all-around photo helping software for Windows is called Picasa:
http://www.picasa.com
Picasa is a product of Google, and is completely free. It has no ads, spyware, adware, or other crapola, and is made by good people.
Picasa, when loaded, searches your computer for images. It can check your My Pictures folder, your desktop, and any other places you store images. Then it categorizes them by folder and date, and presents you with an easy interface for finding and manipulating your photos. It is very easy to use, don't worry!
I've been doing this computer thing since the beginning, and regularly use Photoshop and other pro software packages, but I still like Picasa for my everyday photo organizing, because it is very intuitive, and makes common tasks very fast and easy.
To use Picasa to tweak and prepare an image for posting, double click an images thumbnail in Picasa, and use the bar on the left to 'tweak' the image if necessary. You can bring up the fill light, 'crop' the image to remove extra areas that aren't important, or adjust the color. (note to pixel-heads, Picasa uses pretty intelligent adjustments, far better than just 'contrast brightness', and more similar to Photoshop's adaptive highlight/shadow adjustment system. Good enough that I only break out Photoshop for the toughest touchup cases.)
Then, click the 'export' button on the bottom right corner of the Picasa window. This will export a new copy of the image, but with the size and quality settings of your choosing.
Choose the folder you want it to place the exported image in. By default this will be My Pictures\Picasa Exports\ which is fine.
For "Image Size Options" choose "Resize" and adjust the slider. The number shown will be the number of pixels wide or tall (whichever is larger) the final image will be. You will want to use "640" or "480" for posting on this forum.
For "Image Quality Setting" choose a value like 50%. The higher the number, the larger the image.
Then click "OK" to save the exported image. Minimize Picasa and navigate to the folder with the exported image (My Pictures/Picasa Exports by default). Right click on the image and select "Properties". Look at the "Size" value for the image. You should see something like "59 kb". This size must be below "65 kb" to post on this forum. If the number is
above 65 kb, delete the image, go back to Picasa, and go through the export procedure again, this time choosing a smaller image size "480" instead of "640" for instance, or a lower quality setting.
The forum
Once the image is under 65kb, it is time to post on this forum.
Below the text box for your reply you'll see a button called "Manage Attachments". Click this button to open a new small window. Using this window you can choose and upload up to 5 images, each of which must be less than 65kb.
Click the "Browse" button and navigate to the folder that holds your exported images (My Pictures/Picasa Exports by default). Select the image and click "Open".
Then click the "Upload" button on the "Manage Attachments" window.
You should see the text "Uploading File(s) - Please Wait...". This may take a moment depending on the speed of your internet connection.
If the attachment is successful you should see a link in the new Manage Attachments window to your image, with its size listed, as well as a new "Upload" box and button below that for adding another image (if you desire).
If the image is above 65 kb you will get an error, and the image will not be attached. The system will also not allow you to attach an image that is already attached to another thread.
Once you have chosen all of your images and Uploaded them, click the "Close This Window" button on the Manage Attachments window, and return to your post. You should see a list of your images in place of the original "Manage Attachments" button. Submit your post as usual, and the images will now be attached to that post!
Ta da!
Images that are already on the web
Do you have an image you would like to post that is already online? If you have uploaded an image to your personal webspace, or want to post an image off of another website, here is what you must do.
If the image is on a webpage, and you are using Internet Explorer, go to that webpage, right click on the image, and select "Properties". Then select the Address field, that looks like this "http://www.history.navy.mil/ac/d-day/88198v2.jpg" and hit Ctrl-C to copy the URL.
In the Mozilla or
Firefox browsers, which are better in every way, simply find the image you wish to use, right click, and select, "Copy image location".
Then, in your post, decide where you want your image to appear (linked images like this appear full size, in the place that you put the link). In that location, type:
HTML Code:
[img]http://www.history.navy.mil/ac/d-day/88198v2.jpg[/img]
Simply type the first img tag (surrounded by the square brackets), hit CTRL-V to paste the URL of the image, and then type the second img tag (with square brackets, and preceding '/'.
Now your image will appear within your post. Remember that using this method, the image is not moved to the Shop Forum servers, so if the original webpage goes down, or the image is deleted by the webmaster there, the image will no longer appear here.
Notes
65kb is often complained about as 'too small', but on a forum of this size, the thousands of images being uploaded takes up a huge amount of space. As a webmaster myself, I can attest to the high cost of storage space! The ability to attach images at all is fairly rare among forums, and should be considered a valuable priviledge.
If you must show a higher resolution image, offer to email people higher res copies, or upload your image to your own web space (often offered to you by your ISP), and post a link to the full size image as described above.
I hope this post will be of use to people who are just getting used to their digital cameras (and people who are already used to them, but are looking for a better tool)! The web is a powerful vehicle for information, and it is true that "an image speaks 1000 words". Thanks for participating.
Peace,
Sam
P.S. Due disclosure, I don't work for any image processing software company, and don't have any interest in Picasa or any other software product beyond that of a satisfied user.