Firstly before you do anything always make sure you are working on a copy of your photo, never work on the 'master' - the photo as it came off your camera. Place a copy (or copies) of your intended photo(s) to send to the website on your desktop.

Photos that come off your camera can be in a variety of sizes, I've had all sorts sent to me from 640x480px (pixels) up to an enormous 2272x1704px and all sizes in between! The original photos from your camera, depending how your camera is set, will nearly always be at a very low JPEG compression ratio. This is to preserve high quality for personal printing. So an original photo of say 1280x1024px could have a filesize of around 500 Kb (½ Megabyte) - far to large to send, and for your webmaster to store on the server cost effectively.

Photos that are published on the website are resized and cropped to 800x500px and then compressed by a factor of 25% JPEG format, this gives them an average size of 75Kb each.
The format size of 800x500px was chosen to 'fit in' with the original design of the website as well as giving that 'widescreen' appearance - the aspect ratio is actually 16:10 very similar to modern TV's.  This has to borne in mind if you crop your photo before sending them to the website as most cameras take photos at an aspect ratio of 4:3 (16:12). When I receive your photos I need to crop them further losing some of the sky or foreground.
Better to leave them with excessive foreground or sky than for you to crop it off along with some of the side detail and still send it in at a 4:3 aspect ratio  - people's feet WILL be cut off!!

Ideally any photo you send should have a horizontal resolution of 1024 and at 4:3 it will have a vertical resolution of 768px. This gives me greater editing power to ensure that only unimportant parts of the photo are cropped off.
Of course if you feel confident you could crop and resize the photo yourself to 800x500pixels your photo would then be published un-edited.  (see the tutorial below)
If you send in a photo of less than 800px horizontal (say 640x480) then I can still publish it BUT, I will be increasing its size with the obvious and significant loss of quality.

Up to now I have been talking exclusively about photos taken in Landscape format, should you rotate your camera through 90 degrees and send in a portrait picture then resize so it comes out at around 450x600 (3:4).
I will then crop to fit and possibly join it onto another portrait photo - examples of me doing this you may have seen in the photo gallery already.

Right that's the technical description - How do we do it?

Firstly for those using Windows XP:- 

You may or may not be aware of a "Powertoy" plug-in from Microsoft which makes the job extremely easy.

First download the small (520kB) 'plug-in' from the Microsoft site at:
http://download.microsoft.com/download/whistler/Install/2/WXP/EN-US/ImageResizerPowertoySetup.exe  and install it.

What this little program does it to add a choice "Resize Image" to the right click context menu.

So... Copy the photos you want to send to the website into a separate temporary folder, left click one of them to highlight it and then hit Ctrl A to highlight all of them.

Next right click on the highlighted list and select "Resize Image" from the pop up menu.
A box will open, select "Large (fits a 1024 x 768 screen)". (sending pictures in at this size give me better editing power when I reduce to 800x500)
Now click the advanced button and tick  the two boxes:-  "Make pictures smaller but not larger" and "Replace original pictures"  then click OK.

The utility will then resize and recompress the picture files before your very eyes, watch the filesizes shrink of all the highlighted photos.

When finished upload the photos as an attachment to an email in the usual way to this website at the usual address.

Back to NLCC Home Page

I don't  use Windows XP:- 

If you are using an operating system other than XP, do not wish to install the very small Microsoft plug-in or want to do the job manually then I suggest using the excellent Jasc software "Paint Shop Pro" although many other programs like Adobe, Corel, MS Picture It, etc. will all do the same, once you find the right buttons to click!  Paint Shop Pro is shareware and you can try it out for 60 days by downloading a fully working trial copy from the  Corel Website  (Jasc has merged with Corel)

The tutorial below uses Paint Shop Pro and Paint Shop Pro was used to produce the screen shots!

Working on the COPY of your photo - Load the image into Paint Shop Pro.

Under the 'Image' toolbar click 'Image Information' this will bring up a dialogue box.

As you can see the original size of my sample photo is 2288x1712 pixels - far too large!

Under the same 'Image' drop down menu, select 'Resize'

This opens up the resize box. Select a width of your choosing - in my example I have chosen 800pixels.

Ensure the 'Maintain Aspect Ratio' Box is ticked the height will automatically be adjusted as you specify the horizontal resolution, and you do want your final image to look right - not squashed or stretched!

Click OK

Select the crop tool and crop to full width but only 500 pixels high.

Keep your eye on the status bar bottom left for the final photo size as you are dragging the crop indication lines around. Once you have an approximate crop window you can adjust each crop line individually or move the entire box up/down by left hold clicking within the box.

Once you have it right double click within the cropping box to crop.

Having cropped the photo now to 800x500 we need to save it. Choose 'Save As' select save as type JPEG
and specify a different filename (so you can do it all again with your original when you realise you have made a mistake!)

Important:- Before saving click the Options button to open up the 'Save Options' box. Here you can specify the compression factor 25 is a happy medium between filesize and quality for the website. Click OK and go on to save your masterpiece!

The example I used in this tutorial is a photo of a little known 'locals' beach near to Santa Cruz on Tenerife, you need your own car to get to it!
The original filesize was 803Kb and after going through the process described above it has come out at just 67Kb.
This is very significant saving both in your upload time and in storage space on the northlancs server.
Without this level of compression I would only be able hold about 10% of the photos that are currently on the site for you to look through.

Take a close look at the actual finished photo used in the tutorial  - doesn't look too bad does it??

• Has this FAQ / Tutorial helped?
• Is it too technical?
• Do you want more detail?
• Have you any specific questions you still need answering? - If so I'll add them.

Please contact me and let me know your views -- Thanks.. Lawrence. (your NLCC webmaster)