Orkneycommunities Plus

RESIZING PICTURES

When you are logged in to your Orkneycommunities site you can upload pictures to it using the 'Pictures' section of the Admin Options page, and then place them on a page using one of the 'Add picture here' buttons on the page in question.

A picture may be placed TOP, LEFT or RIGHT with respect to the text box below or beside the 'Add picture here' button, and should be of the correct size to suit the placement. The correct size for a picture placed TOP is up 560 pixels wide, and for a picture placed RIGHT or LEFT is about 220 pixels wide.

As pictures from digital cameras are generally much larger than this, resizing of pictures is usually necessary, and this page and the next attempts to show how this may be done using picture editing software. Cameras also may save pictures in the 'wrong' format such as TIFF or TIF files, instead of as JPG files as required. Again image editing software can be used to do the conversion.

Note that all the following is done on your own computer, prior to uploading the resized picture to your website.

The software used here is Irfanview , which is available as a free download for non commercial use. Irfanview was pointed out to me by Jeff Barrett, and is an excellent suggestion as it is straightforward to use and install, and quick to download as it is less than 1MB in size.

Irfanview may be obtained by visiting the Irfanview website at http://www.irfanview.com.

(NB Difficulties have been reported in downloading Irfanview from the official download site- it may be downloaded directly by right clicking here and selecting 'Save Target as...' )

Opening an image for editing

After downloading and installing Irfanview we can open a picture for resizing, as shown in the screenshot below.

We select 'Open' from the 'File' menu on the top toolbar, and then browse for the picture to be resized (or edited in some other way) which is saved on our computer, using the dialogue box which pops up.

After selecting a picture and pressing the 'Open' button in the dialogue box, the picture will now open and be displayed within the Irfanview viewer.

Resizing the picture

To resize the picture we now select 'Resize/Resample' from the 'Image' menu on the top toolbar as shown below.

Note that the image that has been opened is a BMP file, but we can convert this to a JPG type file when we save it. First we must resize it to the required size, which we will choose to be 560 pixels wide, and a height that maintains the same height to width ratio as the original picture (the 'aspect ratio'). This is done simply through the dialogue box that Irfanview pops up when we select 'Resize/Resample', as shown on page 2 of this tutorial.