Pictures in your Blogs – For my Wife and Daughters

This posting is basically for my wife and daughters who are running their own blogs right now.

First problem they had was a breaking up page with pictures too big. Now their problem is some pictures are replacing others and they are starting to have the same pictures.

I told them to email me the pictures and I will fix them as I give tips to them as well through my own blog.

Here are the tips.

  1. I can see babe, you tried resizing some of Jamie’s pics, which was good. Looks like you got the right size. But also try changing the resolution. All images should be 72dpi (or dots per square inch, also called pixels per square inch) Since monitors cannot display beyond 72dpi (monitors can display up to 96dpi, but the 72dpi and 96dpi make a negligible difference) In that way you get the maximum image quality the monitor can display and the smallest file size so that downloading is faster too.
  2. In some cases the images are small and when resized to fit in the page makes the image even smaller to appreciate. If the picture has a lot of space around it, background that is not important, you can crop out the background and not just resizing, so your image it still big.
  3. Generally a big image that you shrink down still has good quality, but a small image that you stretch to be big, starts to become pixelated, you start to see big squares, jagged edges, and generally blurry. And I understand you have been scanning some pictures there at home. If ever you want to make a picture bigger, it is best to scan at a higher dpi, like 150 to 200 will do, then as you resize you also change the resolution to 72dpi. So there is not much image lost in making it big.
  4. Resize the actual image, and do not use Blogger to resize it. This is for Ate Dawn naman. Her images are resize through HTML with height and width attributes of the image tag or using CSS width and height styles to the image. It does resize it, but the image is really big and the file size is big, thus downloading takes longer. When you resize the actual image, you also adjust the resolution to 72dpi as well for better downloading.
  5. You now have problems in your blogs with new pictures replacing some of the old pictures. Why? Simply because all your pictures are all in the same place and when you upload a picture with the same file name it replaces the old one. A picture that is always named jamie.jpg or dawn.jpg will always replace the picture with the same name. It is better to name the pictures of what the topic of your blog is about like swim1.jpg. swim2.jpg. For me, just to be sure I do not overwrite my pictures and I feel lazy making folders on the server, I name my files: yyyymmdd-eventx.jpg, where yyyymmdd is the date I uploaded the picture and event will be replaced with the event name of the picture and x is the picture number. So if I have 3 pictures during a picnic today June 5, 2005. My pictures will be named: 20050605-picnic1.jpg, 20050605-picnic2.jpg and 20050605-picnic3.jpg.

To my other blog readers, hey I know this is like kids stuff to you, but this is for my wife and daughters. I already gave them the tips and their next lesson is how do they it in Photoshop.