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Almost all raw images from cameras will need to be resized before you can upload (why?). Note that this resizing (within reason) does not materially affect the picture content, only the number of pixels that represent it and therefore the size of the file on the disk.
Approach 1: Online picture editing websites
There are several free online websites which will allow you to upload and edit a large (or small) picture. Generally speaking you can resize and/or make other adjustments, such as cropping for example, before downloading the adjusted image to your computer. You can then upload the adjusted image either to the gallery, or to a forum posting on this website, as necessary. There are a few such sites in our links.
The upside is that you don’t need to install any software on your computer to use this method. The downside is that it’ll be slow uploading a large file to the website and the online image manipulation can be a bit sluggish to use. Nonetheless, if you’ve only one or two to do, it might be the easiest solution.
Approach 2: Install and use resizing software
There are lots of programs out there for doing all kinds of fancy image manipulation. Some are commercial, but there are also some excellent free alternatives that you can download and install. PIXresizer is an example of a very simple program which does little other than picture resizing through an easy graphical interface. It doesn’t allow cropping. You can find this and others through the downloads section of this website, here.
The upside of this approach is that it’s a very fast and potentially flexible method. You can resize multiple images at once and you only have to upload the smaller resized image(s) once. The downside is that you need to have sufficient rights to install software on your machine, which may not be easy if it’s not your computer.
Method
- Upload your source image to your website image editor of choice, or start your image editing software and load the image.
- If you want to crop the image, do that first.
- Resize the image according to the maximum limits below. Be sure to check the box to maintain aspect ratio (keep proportions), otherwise your picture may look stretched horizontally or vertically.
- Download if necessary and save the resized image to your disk. Be sure not to overwrite the original source image!
- Now you can upload to the gallery, or include in a forum posting as you wish.
Limits
For inserting a picture directly into a forum posting, the file size (on the disk) must be 8,192Kbytes or less. Reduce the picture size further if the file is still too big.
For uploading to the gallery, you must resize to fewer than 1Mpixels, ie. width x height < 1,000,000. For example, 1024 x 768 pixels = 786432 pixels, which is okay. Smaller in either dimension is fine. The file size (on the disk) must be 500kbytes or less. Reduce the picture further if the file is still too big.
Why must images usually be resized before uploading?
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