Hopefully
this page will be an ongoing project. I need your suggestions,
recommendations and comments in order to make this a valuable tool.
The purpose of this page is to help you in transferring photos to
Fred's Place.
First,
please, please DO NOT attach photos to e-mail that you send to me.
It really clogs my already overloaded mailbox and drastically slows everything
down to a crawl. Imagine getting 10 or so photos - some larger than a megabyte
in size mixed in with several hundred other e-mails - ugh! I don't need anymore
photos attached to e-mails. Please use the Upload Utility to send any
photos to Fred's Place.
Second,
believe me, I don't know everything so if you know a better way or have a hint
you'd like to share, e-mail me and I
will include your hints on this page.
File
size is my utmost concern. Let me say that again, file size is my utmost
concern. Why? File size affects not only the time you have to spend
uploading the file, but file size affects how fast the Photo Album Page loads
to your browser and how quickly you can view photos. I won't concern you with
disk storage space and bandwidth issues as these are my concerns that I must
contend with.
How
can you adjust file size? Do you have to live with what the scanner produces?
Do you have any control over file size? I cannot address each of these questions
with specific answers because there are so many different programs that are in use,
but I do have some general guidelines you can probably understand and apply to your
photo scanning programs.
Once you've scanned your photo, click on "EDIT" up on the toolbar of your scanning
program, and look for a "RESIZE" or "RESAMPLE" option.
Your program my give you the option to reduce or resize by percentage or by
pixel/inch attributes, or maybe even both.
I limit all photos to no more than 800 pixels wide.
Adjust your settings until you have a photo that "fits" on the screen. No
horizonal or vertical scroll bars should be required to "see your photo".
Size does not always dictate quality. Sometimes smaller photos are better than
large photos.
Save your photo in JPEG format (.jpg). This format usually provides the clearest
photo with the smallest file size.
If
you have some specific settings for specific programs, send them to me and I'll
post them on this page.
Cropping
your photos can also reduce filesize. What is cropping? Many photo programs
have a cropping option. Cut or crop excessive sky, foreground or borders from
your photos.
Filenames.
You can of course name you file whatever you want but I have already experienced
some problems. Several people named their photo "scan1.jpg" and uploaded the file
to Fred's Place. Guess what? Yep, the second file overwrote the first and we
lost the first photo completely. Another problem is having spaces in the filname.
I suggest you remove the spaces because for whatever reason if a filename has a
space in it you cannot view it after you upload the photo.
Referring
to a photo file. If you want to draw my attention to a photo, please refer to
it's filename that I assign to it. Roll your pointer over the small photo,
and look at the bottom line of your browser. You should see the filename I've assigned
to the photo. I have assigned sequential numbers to each photo so that I do not have
to content with two or more "eagle.jpg". Believe it or not but I've already received
one e-mail saying "that cutter in the water isn't a 311 it's a 327". At least I
was able to disregard all the cutters on dry land when I went looking for that photo!
Finally, though
not a scanning program, LviewPro is my choice of programs for editing photos.
It is a shareware program available at: http://www.lview.com.
Lview has great resizing and cropping features. Although Lview has a viewer, I perfer
ACDSee as my offline photo viewer. ACDSee is also a shareware program available at:
http://www.acdsystems.com/.
