Image Repository And Social Networking Websites: Can You Keep Up? (Part I)

The internet has brought about an astounding variety of photo-related URLs. Most of them are free to sign-up with, with subscription fees for deluxe features or a larger photo storage space. Their functions range from experienced to novice, from social networking to photo sharing, from selling your photos to bookmarking what you like. In addition to this, a good number of these websites blend such features to cook up their own recipe.

You can be a contented fanatic and exhaust days learning all your options, or easily get going on one of the more widely held sites, where you’re virtually sure to have a fine experience with a plethora of features to keep you busy.

But what does it take other than getting pictures onto the hard disk drive? I almost forgot! A number of websites even let you upload images right from your cell phone! Now, allow me to rephrase that. What are the requirements to get your photos prepared for image sharing sites?

Once you pick the photo sharing website that suits your requirements, you’ll need to identify the limits there are on bandwidth. Is there a monthly maximum value as to how many pictures you can upload? Is there a cost to upgrade to a higher storage limit? Of course that only matters if you’ll want to share a great number of photos.

If you are concerned about the maximum values, there are a few things you can do to stay under that radar and get around upgrading. Your best preference is to upload only the pictures that are really worth sharing, either for the reason of their special importance, or because of their artistic merit. Evidently, that depends on why you’re there. If you’re choosy, you’ll be uploading fewer photos, and making the most of what you do share.

Many picture sharing sites do not have image dimension limitations because these sites are intended to share high quality photos. However, if you don’t require the highest resolution, resizing the picture is an excellent idea. If your image capture device was set to high quality, but you only want to share photo, you can use a program such as Bulk Photo Resizer to do the chore very effortlessly.

In fact, if you have a lot of pictures with similar requirements, you can have Bulk Photo Resizer carry out the same operation on all of them at the same instant. This is a great time saver. For a usual family photo that doesn’t need high resolution, you can gratify your visitors with a size from 400 to 600 pixels per inch on the longest side. It just so happens that Bulk Photo Resizer has presets for these dimensions, and others, so you don’t even need to manually input your preferred dimensions. It will even maintain the aspect ratio for you.

Whatever happens, don’t enlarge the photo. Bulk Photo Resizer will stop you from doing this. Enlarging will not enhance your resolution, it will just make the imperfections more visible and more jagged. The larger it is, the more you’ll see jagged edges. These jagged edges or “jaggies” are from the square pixels that make up the image.

As soon as those squares get too big they become pretty apparent throughout the picture, not just on the edging. The photo start looking like the effect you see used on TV to obscure someone’s face.

(to be continued…)

September 20th, 2009