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Alumnae Centre

Adding Photos and other Graphics

Here are a few simple hints and tips:

Where can I add photos?

You can add a photo or other graphic in each of the following areas:

• In your ‘Personal Details’ area
• In your ‘School Details’ area
• When you post a News item
• When you post an item in the Events Calendar

How do I add photos?

1. Click on the ‘Upload Picture’ button
2. Click on ‘Browse...’ to navigate to where you have stored the photo on your hard drive
3. ‘Submit’
4. ‘Confirm’

Photos: basic editing and preparation for the WWW

Almost all images are improved by a little editing — for example, you may wish to crop or resize your photos. It is not necessary to edit your photos before you upload them to webALUMNUS, but if you do want to do this, then you will need a graphics program. If you have a digital camera then you probably already have some appropriate software (as it always comes bundled with the camera) but if you don’t, you may like to consider Paint Shop Pro (which is a really excellent program for the price and includes some sophisticated features) or Irfanview (which contains all you are likely to need for simple editing and is free!).

Rotate

Rotate your photo by 90° if you took a portrait shot on a digital camera.

Crop

Crop your photo of unwanted areas.

Resize

Resize your photo if it is rather large for the screen. This will not only ensure that it loads faster but it could also help to avoid unnecessary horizontal scrolling. Simple mathematical proportions work best: 25%, 50%, 75%, 10%, 20%, 40%, 60%, 80%, 33% and 66%.

Sharpen

If you have resized your photo, you will probably need to sharpen it a little.

Compress

Photos (in .jpg format) can also be compressed: they will load more quickly as a result. You may like to experiment, but a compression level of about 20–30% usually works well.

Image formats — which file type should I use?

You probably won’t need to worry about this but, just for the record, you can upload .jpg or .gif files to St Mary’s webALUMNUS. If you have taken a photograph with a digital camera then this will almost certainly have been saved as a .jpg, which is the correct format.

.jpg

Use .jpg format for photos and other images with lots of shading, tonal variation or detail.

.gif

Use .gif format for images with lots of ‘flat’ colour (e.g. cartoons), text, animations, and simple images with only a small range of colours.