Some of my clients want me to both design and maintain a Web site for them. Others want their web site created with a tool that they can use to manage the site themselves. While the content management tools are fairly easy to use the one thing that often baffles people is managing the photos they want to upload to their site.
Digital photographs are measured in pixels, or tiny dots used to display images on screen. Digital camera manufacturers use the term “megapixels” to describe the resolution of the camera’s photograph size on screen. One million pixels is one megapixel. Its an area measurement like square feet. A typical 8-megapixel camera produces images that are 3266 x 2450 pixels. If you multiply 3266 by 2450, you get 8,001,700 or 8 million pixels.
Images from an 8 megapixel camera can make a good quality 8 x 10” print. However, if you put that same image on a web site without reducing the size, your visitors will go gray waiting for it to load. Computer screen resolution is measured in pixels. Most monitors today have at least a 1024 x 768 resolution or higher. Many older monitors only have screen resolutions of 800 x 600. Do the math and you’ll see that a digital image of 3266 by 2450 pixels imported off your camera will not properly fit into a box that is only 800 x 600 pixels in size.
At the very least, you will need to rotate, crop, and resized your images to make them ready for your Web site.
The size of your Web site’s design (also measured in pixels) will vary. Here are a few image examples along with their dimensions.
400 x 300 pixels
Adobe Photoshop is powerful software for editing images. With a retail price tag of $699, it probably has more features than the average person will use. Luckily, there are free tools available online that will allow you to touch up and resize your digital images. Here are a few that I’ve tried over the years and might be helpful for you.
For PC Users:
Faststone Image Viewer (http://www.faststone.org/FSViewerDetail.htm) has a nice array of features that include image viewing, management, comparison, red-eye removal, emailing, resizing, cropping and color adjustments. This software is freeware. You can download us use it on your PC computer.
300 x 225 pixels
Phoenix (http://aviary.com/tools/phoenix) is an online image editor where you can do basic image retouching to complex effects. Phoenix delivers the key features of a desktop image editor with the simplicity and accessibility of a web-based application.
Photoscape (http://www.photoscape.org) is an easy photo editing software that enables you to fix and enhance photos.
For MAC and PC
GIMP (http://gimp.org) for MAC OS-X is purported to be the Free Photoshop. It is more powerful than Seashore mentioned above.
For MAC users there is:
Seashore (http://seashore.sourceforge.net/index.php) serves the basic image editing needs of most computer users.
200 x 150 pixels