Using pictures from a digital camera or scanner
Photographs taken with a digital camera or created using a scanner are
often huge in terms of the number of pixels - it's not uncommon to
find images of 2,000 x 1,500 pixels (or even greater) being produced
by taking a picture with a digital camera. Such cameras are designed
with
more and more pixel capacity to replace traditional print cameras, but
when we're thinking about images on web pages, these huge images will
slow things down and make our users give up in frustration!
Most users' screens are not much bigger than 1024 pixels wide by 768
pixels high so they would never see the whole image anyway. Hence
it's not a good idea to use 'raw' images from a digital camera,
but it is a good idea to work on them first.
Reducing the dimensions of an image before you place
it on your school's web site can also address some
of the safety issues surrounding publishing images on school web sites.
In general, it's wise to reduce the dimensions of the image so
that it fits inside a typical user's window, unless you have a compelling
reason for leaving it huge. Typically an image with dimensions of
roughly
800 x 600 pixels will be viewable by most people - plus it'll
be
quicker to load and they'll be happier. You could use Irfanview to
do this.
Resizing an image to 400 x 300 pixels will enable it to fit in
most web pages, but if you want to display lots of images, for example
a series of photographs from a school trip or a school production,
then you need to find a useful way of doing it. That's where thumbnails
can come in useful...
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