Compressing Photos

Images are an important part of any website as they visually enhance the viewing of a page making it more interesting that just plain text. Your Wedding Site is the ideal place to show photos of the times you have spent together.

The photo feature in Wedding Edit allows you to upload to your website such photos which will then be displayed in a easy to view slideshow format.

However there may be times when you want to adjust an image before you upload it. For example you may want to crop or resize the photo.

•  Crop – this is when you leave out some of the image. For example in figure 1 there is a picture of a baseball game. The picture could be cropped to show less of the crowd and more of the pitch. The white border shows the area that we could crop to which then gives the cropped image (figure 2).
Figure 1 Figure 2

•  Resize – photos that are taken with digital cameras tend to be very large in size both in terms of the width and the file size (megabytes). An image taken from a digital camera may be over 1600 pixels wide which is more than can fit on a standard computer screen.

When viewing an image on the web, photos do not need to be this large, so they should be reduced first. Wedding Edit websites will automatically reduce the size of the photo if the photo is under 2500 pixels wide. However if it is larger then it will not reduce the size as it takes up too much memory, having a detrimental affect on the web server.

How to reduce and crop images

There are many software programs that will perform these graphic tasks such as Adobe PhotoShop, Macromedia Fireworks and Jasc PaintShopPro.

There is now also a free software tool from google.com called Picasa . The rest of this tutorial will demonstrate how to use Google Picasa to resize, crop and compress your images.

Please note that this is a guide only. Unlike Wedding Edit which is completely web based, Picasa software will need to be downloaded from the google.com website and installed on your machine. Created Media (Providers of Wedding Edit) cannot offer support for the use of Picasa.

Installing Picasa

To download Picasa visit google.com and click on more from the links above the search bar.
From here a listing of Google Services and tools are listed.

•  Scroll down to the bottom and click on Picasa.

•  Download Picasa and install on your Computer.

•  Run the program once it has been installed.

•  The first time you load Picasa it will scan through the documents on your computer. On a Windows PC the first option will scan all images on your computer and the second will just scan ‘My Documents'. It is recommended you select ‘My Documents Only' as this will take less time (First ensure that any photos you want to resize/crop are located in a folder under My Documents).

•  Once it has finished scanning for images it will then display all the images within their relevant category.

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The screenshot on the left shows Picasa. The left-hand column lists all the folders within My Documents that contain images.

•  The thumbnails in the right will show the thumbnails from within the current category.

•  Select the image that you want to resize/crop by double clicking on the thumbnail

•  In the left hand column there are now the different options for the photo such as cropping.

•  There are also some other handy functions such as red eye reduction/ contrast and color adjustment.

•  To crop the image click once on the ‘Crop' option and then drag your mouse over your photo selecting the area you want to appear in the final version of the photo.

•  Don't worry – cropping a photo should not change the original photo but will create a new copy of the photo.

•  In the example below the picture of the Whitehouse is being cropped so that the greyed out area will be removed from the picture. Select what area you want the final photo to show and then press the Apply button. To select the area, click on the top left of the area you wish to show and then drag your mouse (with the mouse button still pressed) until you get to the bottom right. Then let the mouse button go and you should have the cropped area highlighted (like the picture below)

Exporting / Resizing an Image

•  Once you have cropped the picture you can then export it as a small file size before uploading it to your Wedding Edit website. If you have not cropped the image, then you can follow the next few steps to reducing the size of your image.

•  With the image selected in Picasa, go to File > Export to Folder.

•  Under Windows the default export folder will be My Picture\Picasa Exports\FOLDER NAME.

•  If the resize option is greater than 600, change it to 600.

•  Press OK to export save the changes and export the image.

•  Now the image is exported as a smaller file size you can upload it to your website through the Wedding Edit Administration area.

•  Don't forget that you will need to select the exported version of the photo (Ie My Documents\Picasa Exports\FOLDER NAME\IMAGE NAME).

TIP : If you have a large number of photos that you want to reduce in size then you can do this in one go. Select all the photo thumbnails in Picasa that you want to reduce the size of. Select File > Export to Folder. Change the Resize Option to 600 and then press OK. This will then create smaller copies of all the photos that you have selected.

Whilst this guide was written for the purpose of Wedding Edit, you may find that Picasa has other uses as well. If you have a large number of photos to send over email, then reducing them in size in Picasa before you email them will dramatically reduce the time it takes to send!