Guidelines

Here are some guidelines for submitting photos for posting on the Photo Gallery page of the Conibear Web site.

1. Please select the best of your photos and submit only a limited number. We do not have the Web space nor the time for mass submissions.


2. If you have taken a vertical photo, the top of the photo will typically be on either the right or left-hand side rather than the top. You must use a photo processing program of some kind* to "rotate" the photo 90 degrees to the left or right so that the top of the photo actually is on top. Please do not submit photos that are not properly oriented.


3. Please make sure that you are submitting a photo or photos that are appropriately lit, focused and cropped. Perhaps the photo you took meets these standards. That's great. If your photo does not meet these standards, then please use a photo processing program* to enhance the photo to look its best.


4. Please remember that the length of time it takes for a photo to display in a browser is directly related to the size of the photo file. And the size of the photo file depends on the size or resolution of the picture and also on whether the picture has been "compressed" by a photo processing program* to reduce the file size in a way other than reducing the picture size.

   Today's digital cameras can produce very large pictures and large files. The decisions on file size are all judgment calls and compromises. Please use a photo processing program* to reduce the size of your photos and compress them so that they will not be a huge file size. But don't go overboard. We still want a photo that displays with reasonable quality.

   A file size of over 1,000 KB (= 1 MB) is huge and will take up a lot of space on the server and take forever to load into a browser. The photos on many professional Web sites are under 100 kb, because the producers of those Web sites know that visitors don't want to wait a long time for photos to load into their browsers.

   To see the difference in load times, compare these photos: This photo is 115 kb. This photo is 451 kb. This photo is 1,376 kb. And, finally, This photo is a svelte 48 kb!

   (Once you have looked at each of these four pictures, all will load quickly the second time around because they have been stored in your computer's cache and you no longer are fetching them from the Internet.)



5. To submit your photos, you can either give a CD with the photos to Becky Brown or e-mail photos to jhadle AT drizzle.com.

* Photo processing programs include Adobe Photoshop, PaintShop Pro, Picasa, HP Image Zone, and countless others that come with digital cameras and scanners.

You can even use the Windows Fax and Picture Viewer that comes with Windows XP. To find it, just double click on your .jpg file and the picture should come up in the Windows Fax and Picture Viewer. Mac computers also come with built-in software for manipulating photos.

Picasa, an excellent photo organizing and processing program, is available for free download on the Google Web site. http://picasa.google.com/

When you use photo processing programs to alter photos, be sure to do a "Save As" or a "Save Copy As" instead of a plain "Save." The reason is that you always want to keep the original unaltered. You then still have the unaltered original if you decide at a later time that you want to do some other alteration. You do not want to be in the position of having to alter the already altered version.