Uploading Photos From Digital Cameras Into Blog Posts

Taking your own photos to use as images in blog posts are an excellent idea. But uploading photos directly from your digital camera directly into your blog posts isn’t!

The photo size our digital cameras produce are:

• Very large e.g. my 4.0 mega pixel digital camera photos are about 2272 x 1704 pixels and 700 KB in size whereas my 8.0 mega pixel camera are about 3264 x 2448 and 2.4 MB in size
• Designed for printing good quality photos not for uploading directly into blog posts

Just because any image you upload to your blog is now automatically resized to a maximum width of 500 pixels doesn’t mean you should be uploading your photos directly from your digital camera because:

1. It takes longer to upload your image
2. Unnecessarily uses up storage space

What you should be doing is reducing your photo size in both dimensions and file size prior to uploading. I normally reduce the dimension of my photos to 450 pixels wide as this is the ideal image width for my blog theme.

Here are some free programs for reducing photo size which are relatively easy to use:

iPhoto

iPhotos is the program Mac users use for importing, organising, editing and sharing photos. Here are instructions for resizing photos using iPhoto.

IrfanView

IrfanView is a free graphic view and image editing program. Check out this information:

1. To learn how to do basic image editing using irfanView
2. or Watch this tutorial to see how to resize images using irfanView

Picasa

Picasa is Google’s free software for organizing, editing and sharing images. Here are instructions on resizing your photos using Picasa.

Picture Manager

Microsoft Picture Manager is a basic image editing and image management program included in the Microsoft Office Suite starting with version 2003.

This is the program I mainly use to reduce my photo sizes since it’s already installed on the computers I’m using and is adequate for what I’m trying to achieve. Here are detailed instructions on how to use Picture Manager.

PIXresizer

PIXresizer is a free image resizing program which you can download from Bluefive Software. Here are the instructions for resizing images using PIXresizer.

FINAL THOUGHTS

My goal for this post was to share some simple tools that people can use to reduce digital photo size prior to uploading to blog posts. Please feel free to share any links or information that would help others understand more about resizing/resampling and image quality.

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