Sizing Your Photos For the Wizard
From HostBaby Wiki
So you wanna upload some photos to your website? That's great! Here's some stuff to know.
1. Your pictures are too big. Yup, don't tell me how I know, I just do. Well, ok . . . It's because most cameras take really high quality pictures that are dense, large files that contain too many bits and bytes for most web browsers to chomp on. They're basically made especially for high-quality printing, not for the web, where speed counts, and smaller equals faster.
To fit a photo in your Bio, News, Homepage or any other page besides the Photo Gallery, it should probably be sized at around 400-450 pixels wide. Photos that appear in the Photo Gallery expand, so the width is more flexible (currently limited to 3000 x 3000 pixels), but remember, the bigger the photo, the slower it loads.
2. Your picture isn't "web-friendly." Web browser-friendly images have file names that end in .jpg, .png, .gif (I promise it's not our fault, this is just how it is). If your photo does not have one of these extensions, it generally won't work on the web. Other files such as PDFs are not actually photos and will not (yet*) upload to the Image Bank. Instead, you can either try and convert your image to a web-friendly JPG (email us for help!), or upload it into your File Bank. (*we're working on auto-converting PDF to JPG).
Most of our servers can currently auto-convert TIFF and BMP to JPG automatically. If yours doesn't or it doesn't look right, just send us an email with the image(s) as an attachment and we'll do our best to convert it for you :)
3. Your picture is "print-only." Web-friendly image resolution has to be 72 DPI, which is often much lower than normal high-quality photo resolution, such as the original JPG/TIFF image of an album cover.
Ok, now that your totally hip to this, your probably asking, "How do I resize my photos so they look absolutely stunning on my Hostbaby site?"
Well, I'm glad you asked. There are many ways to do this. Most photo programs have a 'save for web' option. This will usually knock the photo down to a manageable size. If you have the option you can try to shrink the width to about 450 pixels. The height doesn't matter so much.
Programs like Photoshop and Google's Free Picasa program have batch resizing abilities so you can resize a whole bunch at once.
Click here for free Picasa for PC
Click here for free Picasa for Mac
Click here for instructions how to bulk resize in Photoshop
If you don't have a photo program, click here for another Hostbaby help file which has several free online resizing tools and sites listed at the bottom of the page.
Just remember. 72 dpi. About 450px wide. And you'll do just great!
