Picture Uploading

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Picture Uploading

 

Resizing and Reducing Your Image

 

Since most monitors display at 72 pixels per inch, the image from your camera is too large and will require scrolling off the screen edge to see it all. Resizing the image to somewhere between 800 and 1024 horizontal pixels is about right for filling the screen.

 

If you're not sure, find some pictures in Gallery with a size that looks good, right-click on an image and select Properties. That'll tell you the file size and resolution in pixels. You'll find that most of the larger ones are 640 by 480.

 

The software that came with your camera can resize and reduce your images. Because there are so many different programs, I'll leave this part up to you. However, if your software is awkward to use, Google's free Picasa gets very good reviews from members here. A crash course in Picasa resizing and reducing (most programs should work about the same way):

 

Select the image so that it appears in the Picture Tray at the left. Click on Export at the right. Use Browse to give it a destination folder, or type it in. Set Resize to 640. Set the Image Quality slider to give a filesize of 50k to a 100k for forum posting (you'll have to experiment with this - try 60% to % at first). Click OK and that's it. To examine the new image, go to its folder, right-click it and select Properties>Summary>Advanced.

 

In Photoshop, you can use Image Size or Save for Web. Enter 500 or 600 for the horizontal size (note that when resizing, both the Constrain and Resample boxes should have a checkmark). An advantage to Photoshop is that it will show you the filesize as you move the Quality slider.

 

Remember to use Save As and give it a new name or Photoshop will overwrite your original.

 

Image Hosting Service

 

There are many of these available on the Web, some of them free. You can upload multiple images, copy the URLs, and then paste the URLs into your forum post wherever you want the picture(s) to appear. You have to add tags to the start and end of the url once pasted for example

[img=http://img390.imageshack.us/img390/6820/nature47pz.jpg]

 

Try putting image hosting into Google and you'll find lots of them. To get you started, here are some free services:

 

http://imageshack.us

http://www.snapfish.com

http://photobucket.com

 

Not surprisingly, they would like you to upgrade to a paid service, so some restrictions apply, such as a filesize limit (typically 1MB per image).