Posting pics

[Seafront Plodder]

I have a few pics to post, but the only way I know to do it is to upload the whole pic to a particular post, and many of mine are just too big

Can someone let me know how to post just the thumbnail (as Antonio has done), so one has to click the link to see the pic.

Please?

[Nigel]

Hi there SP
It's a draining experience leading the field into the stadium, so no wonder you're having technical trouble now.

Each photo has to be less than 100KB. You can load several photos into one post, though. If the total is over 100KB, as in Antonio's recent post, then the photos come up as links, rather than the images themselves.

Don't panic if your photo files are too big. There are several ways to solve this. Firstly, paste the photo into IrfanView (http://www.irfanview.com). Then select Image -> Resize/Resample, and reduce the number of pixels. 800-860 pixels wide seems to be the limit for good display on this site. You can also crop the picture at this point by left-clicking on the photo and dragging the cursor over the area you want to retain and click Edit -> Crop selection.

Then select File -> Save as, and a dialogue box will come up with the save options. Save as a JPG file to minimise space, and play with the compression option until you manage to save it under 100 KB.

Another method, for montages, is to paste the photos onto a blank PowerPoint slide. This way you can jiggle them around, as well as cropping and resizing at will on the screen. Then adjust the zoom in PowerPoint until you're happy with the view size, go to IrfanView and select Options -> Capture/Screenshot, and you can perform a screen capture from the PowerPoint slide. Once you have that, you can go through the various sizing and saving routines above. This will really cut the resolution, but it will give you a single reasonable screen-quality image from lots of photos, and save you the pain of multiple postings.

It's worth bearing in mind that every single step you perform will result in some loss of image quality, so the best workflow is experimenting back and forth to get the right image sizes first, and then redoing the process with the fresh images when you are ready to go. Good luck, and drop me a line if you're still having trouble.

If you have the software, you can use PaintShop Pro or PhotoShop for all of these operations. But the advantage of IrfanView is that although not quite so flash-looking, it's a completely free download, and works just as well. Plod on !

Nigel

[Seafront Plodder]

I'll have another go later.

[Mid Life Crisis Marathon Man]

Don't forget to pre-rasterize the saturation levels or your white balance will force the lumens count to skyrocket, thereby obfuscating the primary colour overload which will prevent you from reducing the pixel count to the point where you can cross-balance the resolution without reconciling the equipedal (or dichotomous, depending on which software package you are using) contrast/quasi brightness quotients in order to stay within the 100kb limits of the system.

[El Gordo]

I managed to miss this thread completely, though Nigel seems to have the situation under control.... manfully aided by MLCM.

To be honest, I didn't know about the 100kb limit. As far as width goes, 800-860 is a bit wide, and will push some of the screen out of view for anyone using a 1024 x 768 resolution or lower.

I've heard of Irfanview but never used it. I've used Photoshop for a few years, though Griff reintroduced me to PaintShop Pro which has become a really decent graphics app for the price (£70 ish?). There's not a whole lot more you can do in Photoshop, which is comparatively very expensive.