The Shar-Pei Forums-Health Behavior Diet & Rescue Info and Discussion Group

If you're having trouble uploading and seeing your pictures; here are some tips:

FILE NAMES - In order to link properly, your picture file name MUST NOT contain any spaces. A file name like "My Little Pei.jpg" should be renamed to MyLittlePei.jpg or My-Little-Pei.jpg or My_Little_Pei.jpg. The web does not like spaces in links and they will break the link.

FILE SIZES - If you are using the Shar-Pei Forums upload function, your picture file MUST NOT be any larger than 75 Kb (Kb = kilobytes). Sorry, but we don't have unlimited storage space on our server. Also, really large files slow down the Forum pages loading for other Members.

If you have really huge photos you must use, you can always use your own website to host larger pictures and link from there. Many ISPs will give you a free web hosting account (Note: Pictures linked from Geocities or Hotmail sites don't seem to work) Or, you can register a FREE account at Dogster.com then upload and link to your pictures from there.

But it's really easy to use our upload function and you can easily control your file sizes so they're not too big. Using one or two simple tools and techniques, you can make your file sizes smaller.

You will need to learn how to use a good image editing program to resize, crop or compress your images down to the proper size. In addition to commercial tools like Photoshop, there are two free programs you can download and use:

IrfanView -A very fast, small, compact and innovative FREEWARE (for non-commercial use) graphic viewer and simple editor for Windows 9x/ME/NT/2000/XP/2003. Very easy to use cropping and resizing functions (I used IrFanView to create the photos on this page).

Paint Shop Pro - A more powerful image editor with many more options for creating and editing pictures and graphics.

Generally, the bigger the picture, the bigger the file size, but there are ways to get around this. Here is an example of a typical 146 Kb. 640 X 480 photo of Linus from a digital camera:

[img]http://www.sharpeiforums.com/images/members/00000001/Linus.jpg[/img]

As you can see, the image dimensions are a little large, and most of the background around Linus is not really needed. Using one of the FREE tools you installed, here are three techniques to get Linus' photo down to size:

</font>

• <font size="2" face="Verdana, Helvetica, sans-serif">[1] RESIZING - You can resize the overall picture dimensions. All digital pictures are made up from thousands of "pixels." Pixels are tiny dots of color. On a PC display, there are 72 pixels per inch, or 5,184 pixels per square inch (72 x 72).
  
  Many digital cameras are set at a resolution of 640 pixels wide X 480 pixels high (or 307,200 pixels). This size is roughly 9" wide by 6.5" high when viewed on a web page, and is larger than you need.
  
  Resizing is where you scale down the overall dimensions by a certain percentage. If you resize Linus' picture dimensions by 50%, it will become about 4.5" wide and about 3.25" high (now only 76,800 pixels!):
  
  [img]http://www.sharpeiforums.com/images/members/00000001/Linus-resize.jpg[/img]
  
  Meanwhile, the file size in Kb. has shrunk from 146 Kb. to 42 Kb., or 70% less than what it was.</font></li>

<font size="2" face="Verdana, Helvetica, sans-serif"></font>

• <font size="2" face="Verdana, Helvetica, sans-serif">[2] CROPPING - You can crop the picture. Cropping is where you trim away the edges of a picture so you retain the main subject and eliminate unneeded background details around it. I prefer cropping to resizing because the main image you want will stay large while the file size gets smaller. Here is Linus' original picture with some of the unneeded backgound detail cropped out:
  
  [img]http://www.sharpeiforums.com/images/members/00000001/Linus-cropped.jpg[/img]
  
  This file is about 66 Kb., 55% less than the original file, and now fits within our file limits. Notice that Linus is still the same size and just the unneeded backgound is gone?</font></li>

<font size="2" face="Verdana, Helvetica, sans-serif"></font>

• <font size="2" face="Verdana, Helvetica, sans-serif">[3] COMPRESSION - All JPG image files use varying amounts of "compression" to squeeze down the file size. You can increase this compression to make the file size even smaller while retaining the overall dimensions. Note that a small amount of color information can be lost when using higher compression settings but it is usually not noticible on a web page. Here is Linus' cropped photo where I have now increased the compression:
  
  [img]http://www.sharpeiforums.com/images/members/00000001/Linus-cropped-compressed.jpg[/img]
  
  The file size is now about 40 Kb., 73 % less than the original photo. See if you can spot any difference between these last two pictures.</font></li>

<font size="2" face="Verdana, Helvetica, sans-serif">
Finally, we'll use all three of the above techniques to create an AVATAR image that can be displayed below your Forum Name. To display properly, your Avatar image should be exactly square; 100 X 100 pixels. Otherwise, it will be distorted when you upload it in your FORUM PROFILE.

First, I cropped the original photo to preserve only Linus' profile at 260 X 260 pixels square. Next, I resized the picture's dimensions to 100 X 100 pixels. Finally, I saved the file at 70% compression (3 on a scale of 1 to 10). Here is Linus' photo, cropped, resized and compressed so it can now be used as an Avatar:

[img]http://www.sharpeiforums.com/images/members/00000001/Linus-avatar.jpg[/img]
[/list]

Using combinations of all three techniques, you can adjust all your pictures to work just about anywhere you want. Feel free to post a reply to this topic if you need more help.

<small>[ September 28, 2005, 09:28 AM: Message edited by: Alan ]</small>

_________________