How to treat pictures and how pictures are treated

This section will discuss the use of pictures on the Young Minds website.

 

We will deal with

• Picture size
  
• Picture formats
  
• Upload of pictures
  
• Picture archives
  
• Copyright

Picture size
Important! The pictures / graphics use on the YM website can have a maximum size of only 480 pixels. If you use pictures / graphics larger that that, they will excide the page borders and the pages will look funny.

It is possible to resize the pictures within the program, but if you upload a large picture it will, Kbyte-wise, still be a big picture after resizing it, and it will slow down the site.

A good advice is therefore, in a photo-editing program such as Paint Shop Pro, Photoshop or any other program of that type, to resize pictures to maximum 480 pixels before using them.

 

Actually you can be certain that you (if you use the coner-anchors of a picture) will not be able to keep the aspect ratio in the picture. It will be deformed.

 

If you however want to resize a picture allready uploaded, the correct way to do it is to doubleclick the picture in editing mode. This will open a dialouge-box.

 

In this box you scale the picture numerically, but remember to indicate that the the scaling should be done in pixels (px).

 

If the picture is too wide you scale the wideness of the picture and leave the higth to 'Automatic'.

 

Picture formats
The system can treat two different picture formats, jpg and gif.

The differences between the two formats are primarily the colour depth and the compression rate.

• Jpg-format is meant to be used primarily for photos where as
• Gif-format is meant to be used primarily for graphics.

Pictures comming from a digital camera are normally in the Jpg-format. They would never be in Gif-format.

The same picture would typically be 2 to 3 times bigger (in bytes, not in size) in jpg-format than it would in gif-format.

The problem is, that photos saved as a gif-file probably would look very bad. Here are some examples to illustrate my point.

A Jpg-picture

Jpg-picture. 250x165 pixels. 16 million colours Filesize 9,23 Kb Smooth colours, note especially the blue sky.

A Gif-picture

Gif-picture. 250x165 pixels. 256 colours Filesize 21,5 Kb Less colours, note especially the blue sky.

This is a Jpg-picture. It is 422x119 pixels and 5378 colours. The filesize is 11,4 Kb. A nice, smooth picture.       This is a Gif-picture. It is 422x119 pixels and 9 colours.  The filesize is 2,8 Kb. A nice, fresh and sharp picture, and it doesn't take up much space.

Upload of pictures

There are a couple of things to consider before desiding which methode of upload you want to use.

 

Important!

do not copy / paste pictures into the pages. It you do, the pictures will only be visible on the particular computer from where you copied it. Use one of the methodes mentioned below.

 

You can upload a picture from your computer, leaving it on the website. The picture is stored in a subdirectory without any doing from your hand. The advantage of this is that it seems very logical. The disadvantage is that you have to upload the picture every time you want to use it. This will take up space on the server.

When a picture has been entered into the site by using one of the methodes mentioned below, then it is possible to copy / paste between pages on the site.

You can also upload the picture to an archive on the website. The advantage if this is that once the picture is on the server, you can use it again and again. Another advantage is that it only takes up space on the server once and finally it is possible to work with pictures on the website without beeing at the computer which originally stored the pictures.

 

 

Upload to the server every time

I am presuming that you want to use a picture (placed on your computer). Yuo are in the texteditor, have written some text and want to insert a picture. What do you do? It is simple:

 

• Place the cursor where you want to insert the picture.
• Click the icon 'Insert picture'. This dialogue box will appear.

 

 

 

• Click the button at the red arrow (this one is in Danish, yours won't be).
• Find the file on your computer and insert it. In the dialogue box you can size the picture, ad border and it colour etc.
• Click 'Insert' when you are ready.
• Pictures published on the Young Minds site will alway have a border of 1 pixel and be grey. If you dislike that you can remove it in the dialogue box from where you insert the picture. Change the border thickness from 1 to 0 on all 4 sides.

 

 

Picture Archives

Picture archives are very easy to use. My suggestion is that you:

• Prepare the pictures / illustrations before you start the design of the pages. Size them, crop them, ad to them etc.
• Upload the pictures to a picture archive by selecting the facility called 'Functions' in the upper left hand side of the page. It looks like this

• Click 'Picture archive'.
• The dialogue-box Picture Archives appears.
• Click the button 'Add picture'.
• The dialogue-box Add picture appears. It looks like this:

 

 

• Click the button by the blue arrow to find the picture you want to put into the archive. Select it and
• Click 'Upload'.
• Repeat the operation if you want to upload  more pictures.
• When you are done, close the dialogue-box.
• If you want to edit the categories, click the button by the red arrow.

 

 

Copyright and other issues regarding pictures, Important!

• Don't use pictures without the consent of the owner.
• Don't use pictures from WWW witout asking the owner.
• Don't publish pictures of persons without asking first.
• Exercise ethical behaviour.