- Joined
- Mar 9, 2002
Today's digital cameras take great photos, and save them as large files. That's great for printing and graphics work, but not so great for displaying your photos on the web.
Our signature guidelines say that you can have up to three separate images in your sig, the total file size of all of the graphics in your sig have to be 50K or less, and each image can be up to 550 pixels wide and 200 pixels tall. If you take a digital photo and upload it to use in a post, you're probably going wind up with a HUGE image.
So what do you do? You'll need to edit the photo on your computer before you upload it to your photo sharing site.
The actual commands to do this are going to be a little different from program to program, but I can explain how to do it in a couple of common software applications, and you should be able to figure out how to do something similar in whatever graphics software you have. Pretty much every digital camera comes with a graphics editor. Drawing programs and tools like Adobe Photoshop and Photoshop Elements are also very popular. Microsoft Photo Editor is bundled in with Microsoft Office.
Regardless of which program you're using, these are the basic steps you'll follow:
1) Launch your graphics editor.
2) Open the file containing your photo
3) Crop the photo so that only the part of the image you care about is showing. No sense wasting limited screen space on background stuff!
4) Adjust the IMAGE SIZE so that it is less than 550x200 pixels
5) Save the file (as a .jpg image), adjusting the FILE SIZE to less than 50K.
6) Upload your image to www.wdwinfo.com/photopost, or another web site that will allow you to create a link to your image.
7) Place a link to your photo in your signature, surrounded by
tags.
(edited to reflect the new signature guideline numbers.)
Our signature guidelines say that you can have up to three separate images in your sig, the total file size of all of the graphics in your sig have to be 50K or less, and each image can be up to 550 pixels wide and 200 pixels tall. If you take a digital photo and upload it to use in a post, you're probably going wind up with a HUGE image.
So what do you do? You'll need to edit the photo on your computer before you upload it to your photo sharing site.
The actual commands to do this are going to be a little different from program to program, but I can explain how to do it in a couple of common software applications, and you should be able to figure out how to do something similar in whatever graphics software you have. Pretty much every digital camera comes with a graphics editor. Drawing programs and tools like Adobe Photoshop and Photoshop Elements are also very popular. Microsoft Photo Editor is bundled in with Microsoft Office.
Regardless of which program you're using, these are the basic steps you'll follow:
1) Launch your graphics editor.
2) Open the file containing your photo
3) Crop the photo so that only the part of the image you care about is showing. No sense wasting limited screen space on background stuff!
Usually, cropping is done by drawing a box around the part of the image you want to keep, then choosing commands like "Edit, Crop" or "Image, Crop."
4) Adjust the IMAGE SIZE so that it is less than 550x200 pixels
Once you've cropped the picture, reduce it to the precise size in pixels that you want. Look for commands like "Image, Resize" and some sort of box that will let you adjust height and/or width. Often, you can choose whether these numbers are pixels, inches, or centimeters. You should be able to enter either height or width, and the other will adjust automatically.
5) Save the file (as a .jpg image), adjusting the FILE SIZE to less than 50K.
This could be very different from program to program. In Photoshop Elements, choose SAVE AS, specify JPEG as the file type, and click SAVE. You'll then get a JPEG OPTIONS box that displays the current file size, and has a slider bar you adjust to reduce the file size.
6) Upload your image to www.wdwinfo.com/photopost, or another web site that will allow you to create a link to your image.
7) Place a link to your photo in your signature, surrounded by
(edited to reflect the new signature guideline numbers.)