Here is a Quick Way to Prepare Photos for the Web

Ever happened to you to get an e-mail from someone containing a link to a bunch of pictures published on a website? In case you're lucky and you don't need to create an account in order to see them, you often just see some thumbnails and when you click them it takes forever to download the photos. After two or three photos that take 10 minutes to load and don't even look that great, you probably abandon the whole thing and move on to something else. Your friends would probably do the same with your photos if they had a similar experience.

If you want all your photos to be viewed, you need to work on them a little bit before publishing them on an online photo service. This may mean you have to take each one separately and resize it, crop it, rotate it and compress it to a smaller format until it's good enough to be published. While a photo should be at least 6 MB if you want to print it, but for the web usually 20-60 KB is enough. If you resize the photo proportionally to your PC screen and save it in a compressed format it will load much faster. If you save your photos in the appropriate format, they can be easily downloaded and viewed and the visitor can read your comments before they load. With thumbnails, clicking on each one and waiting for the photo to load can become really boring.

If you don't usually print your pictures, you can keep the quality setting on your camera at the lowest. This usually produces pictures about four times larger than an average computer screen, so it is more than enough. You can use IrfanView to edit your photos for the web. It is a free, light and fast program that allows you to manually edit each photo, using shortcut keys to rotate and resize. If you have several photos that need to be rotated in the same direction, you can use Total Commander (another program you can download for free). After opening Total Commander, you right click on a folder, then click Explore and Thumbnail view. Keep the CTRL button pressed to select several photos, then right click and select Rotate Clockwise or Counterclockwise depending on your needs. A professional photographer friend said that he once had several macro pictures which he wanted to adjust in the same way and made a macro in Photoshop to go through the photos and make all the adjustments at once. You can try this one to if you need more than rotating.

Even if you keep the quality setting at your camera at the lowest, you probably still need to resize the photo as they are still larger than the computer screen and can take up a lot of space. If you IrfanView as the default program to view pictures, you can double-click the first picture and then press L or R if it needs to be rotated to the left or right. Then you press CTRL + R to resize. At the bottom-left part of the screen you have an option to 'Keep aspect ratio'. If you have this option checked it helps keeping the same proportions while resizing. Then in the 'Set new size' window you can type between 350 and 700 depending on the horizontal and vertical dimensions of the photo. If you don't like the new size, you can press CTRL + Z to get back to the original. This is better than resizing again, as many resize operations can negatively impact the quality. You can also play with the color and brightness effects if you want, but it is better to do this in more sophisticated programs such as Corel Draw. Once you're done with resizing, you press S (shortcut key for 'Save as' ). Your photo will remain in the original folder once you've set it up this way. Then in the options tab you can select the quality of the image (around 80% should be enough) and click enter. Go to the folder where you've saved it and check out the size in kb. If you're satisfied, you can do the other pictures in the same way. Your photos should turn out between 20-70 kb so they will load really fast. They'll take up between 1/4 and a full screen depending on each image.

The next step is choosing a way to post your photos on the web. If you only have a few, a good way of doing this is putting the photos and the text in tables. As the reader goes through the text, the images load in the background. If the text is long enough, the download should be complete by the end of it. If you have more pictures, you can make a small horizontal slide show. So it all goes down to a few simple operations. Once you get used to them, they become a second nature and you can perform them very fast.

If you work with a lot of photos, you might want to make certain adjustments to all of them at once. When you have the first picture opened, click CTRL + T and you will view the thumbnails of the other photos. Clicking on the first one and then on the last with the SHIFT key pressed will select all photos, while holding down the CTRL key will enable you to individually select several photos. Once you've selected the photos you want, press B and you'll open Batch Conversion. Choose the directory, output format and so on and then click the options tab and then 'Set advanced options' . Once you've done this, in the application's thumbnail window you can right click on the pictures you've selected and do a bunch of things to them.

If you edit each photo individually, apart from resizing and rotating you may need to crop it too. This is a very simple task. All you need to do is select the area you want to keep with your mouse and then press CTRL + Y. If the image is too large to fit your screen and you can't see which part of it you want to crop, you can zoom out by pressing the minus key. Pressing plus will zoom back in.