Saving Pictures to Forum

Introduction

This document is an attempt to help users with setting pictures to manageable sizes and uploading into forum topics and replies.

In this document

Following is a list of topics in this document:

Topic

Overview

Shrinking your picture

Uploading to Forum

Introduction

A brief discussion of the issues.

Performance

As a great many people have already found out, there is nothing more frustrating while using the web to reach a site that is peppered with pictures that are very large in physical size and just the browser display has been set to shrink their appearance after the download. This definitely ranks near the top in bad web etiquette.

While pictures are most certainly worth a thousand words in our hobby, the download time should not take the time of hundreds of thousands of words!

Dimensions

If you are lucky enough to have obtained a fairly new computer system and large monitor (and your eyes aren’t as bad as mine) then you may have set your screen size to something like 1600 x 1200 pixels. But some of use either are making due with some older hardware or have bad enough eye sight to require monitor settings such as 1024 x 768 or even 800 x 600. Trying to view a picture that has dimensions of 1280 x 960 on such a screen makes it all but meaningless.

Quality

While we all want to view pictures with crystal clear quality, the fact remains that when displayed on most computer monitors, even at full screen size, we are talking a much lower resolution than we get out of most digital cameras or even scanners.

So transmitting images at that high resolution ends up being wasted bandwidth, at least for the purposes of our forum.

Compression

Without worrying about the details of particular algorithms, a number of image formats allow the image to be internally compressed. Some compression algorithms allow the image to be decompressed back to exactly the original state. That is called ‘Lossless’ compression. A well known example of this is the compression used for ZIP files. Other algorithms can compress the image, but when asked to decompress, some of the information cannot be reconstructed and the image is less than perfect. That is called ‘Lossy’ (not lousy!) compression. The most common example of this is the compression applied to images using the JPEG format.

As bad as the ‘Lossy’ compression may seem, when coupled with the lower resolution of a display monitor, very few people can discern the difference between an original picture and a copy that is compressed as much as 80%+. Only when making photographic prints does the ‘fuzziness’ begin to appear.

Note that this compression has nothing to do with the display dimensions of the image.

Color Depth

Photographic images are most typically stored with the ability to contain up to more than 16 million discrete colors. On the other hand, many of the graphical images (hand made) are stored with the ability to only have 256 discrete colors.

This all translates into how much space is needed to define the color of each image pixel. To hold a number that may represent any one of 16 million colors requires about 3 times as much memory as for just 256 colors.

However, it would be a very bland world indeed if all photographs could handle only 256 discrete colors in the entire picture. Perhaps the all white aircraft parked on a snowdrift ‘might’ workout, but even that is unlikely. But, if you upload an image that is a straight forward diagram, feel free to make it only 256 depth. ‘GIF’ images are most typically used for this and can compress quite small.

Introduction

An introduction to managing your picture(s).

What Software

There seems to be about as many software packages to manage images as there are images to be managed!

At this point, I am going to assume that if you have access to some of the more complex image manipulation products such as Paint Shop Pro or Adobe Photoshop etc. you really don’t need to follow along with these details as this may be already obvious.

But, if you are like tens of thousands of people that got their computers with software such as Microsoft Works bundled, then you also most likely have a version of Microsoft Picture It! Even if this is NOT what you use, by following along, you should likely be able to translate the actions into your favorite package.

Picture It!

Begin by launching the application in whatever manor you are used to doing. You should be able to go to the ‘Start’ button, select ‘All Programs’, and then find ‘Microsoft Picture It!’. The following screen shots are from the version that comes with Works 2002, but yours will be similar.

When it starts, you should see a window similar to this:

Locating your picture

To find the picture you want to ‘shrink’, click on the option indicated by the red and grey arrow:

This will result in the following window appearing:

To locate your picture, begin by selecting the option ‘Somewhere else’. Then browse through the resulting directory list until you find the directory that contains your picture. Small thumbnail versions will appear to the right. Select the image that you wish to upload, then go down to the lower left corner and select the ‘Open’ button.

Setting the new file save location

You should now see a copy of your picture shown, along with a number od editing options down the left side. This is so simple you won’t need any of them, so just go and select the file option as indicated by the red and grey arrow. A dropdown list will appear and select the ‘Save As’ option.

This will result in a window like that below. As indicated by the arrows, make sure that the ‘Catalog Item’ option at the bottom of the window is unchecked. Then select the folder that you want to store the modified picture into.

Then make sure the ‘Save as this type’ option is set for JPEG, and click the small blue ‘Options’ box underneath. This results in a window appearing as shown in the next section.

New image settings

Make sure that the option for ‘True Color’ is selected and that ‘Compression type’ is set at JPEG (it should be already). This will take care of the ‘Color Depth’ issue. Then set on the option for ‘Custom Size’ and ‘Maintain aspect ratio’. In the width column, enter in the value of ‘350’. The height value will automatically change to the correct value when the next action is selected. This will take care of the ‘Dimensions’ issue.

Then set the compression level value to something around a value of 60. This will take care of the ‘Compression’ issue. The target is to get the resulting image size to about 10 Kb or less. If it ends up being larger than this, repeat this process but select a slightly larger compression level.

Now select the ‘OK’ button to return to the previous screen.

Making a new filename

You are now back to the previous ‘Save As’ window. As indicated by the arrow, type in a new file name for this modified picture. It is a good idea to not replace the original picture, since the compression algorithm will not allow you to restore the picture to its original size at the same quality.

Then select the ‘Save’ button and you will have a new and smaller picture ready for download. As mentioned previously, if this new file is still not small enough, repeat the whole process using the original picture file as input and select a larger compression value.

After the save is complete, exit the Picture It! Program.

Introduction

This will explain the steps to upload an image into a forum topic or reply.

Entering a new topic or reply

This is not an explanation on how to navigate through the forum, so look elsewhere if that is what you need.

After selecting the option to post a new topic (or reply), you should get a window that looks  like this:

Fill in Subject and explanation

Begin by filling in the expected subject line and message body as shown in the example:

Near the bottom of this window (scroll down if needed) you will see a header with the words ‘Add an Attachment’ (hard to read in this view). If you click the ‘Browse’ button you will proceed with the system window shown in the next section.

Selecting the desired image

Using the window shown below, navigate to where you saved your shrunken picture file, select it and click the ‘Open’ button.

Adding picture as an Attachment

At this point you will notice that the filename field is filled in with the location on your computer. Next, enter some file comment text explaining something about the picture.

When you have done this, click the ‘Add Attachment’ button (not Submit), and the result should look like the next window.

Submitting the end result

Here you can see that a new empty ‘Add Attachment’ section is shown, followed by any and all ‘Posted Attachment’ sections. If you change your mind you can delete the attachment(s) or just alter the associated comment. You can also add several more attachments if desired by repeating the above steps.

It is very important to note that the message and all your attachments have not yet been entered into the system, and the topic or reply will be lost if you just exit now.

You must use the ‘Submit’ option at the bottom to finish registering this topic and associated attachments.

The end result should look like the entry above. Good Luck