Southern Fields Web Service

Getting Your Photos Ready For The Web

You add photos to your website for a lot of reasons. But photos straight from your camera or from a disk usually aren’t ready for the web.
In general, photos must be

1. At screen resolution (72dpi), and–
2. Of a size (height and width, usually measured in pixels) that does not exceed the space allotted for them in the columns of your website/weblog.

They must be in a web-supported format, usually:

• .jpg
• .png
• .gif

If you already have a photo-editing program on your computer such as Adobe Photoshop, Adobe Photoshop Elements, Adobe Fireworks, Gimp, Gimpshop, or Corel Paint Shop (among many others), you are ready to go. You can find tutorials for fine-tuning and enhancing your photos for the web easily by doing a web search on “(your photo-editing program) + web + tutorial”.

But if you don’t already have one of these programs, you can use any one of several free web-based photo-editors to prepare your photos for web use. These “web-apps” are a little slower and less capable than a full-blown photo-editing program that lives in your computer, but for editing a few pictures at a time they are quite good and quite free! And– you can edit photos anywhere from any computer anytime– that’s the “web app” advantage.