One of the most often asked questions of the webmaster is how to crop or resize your art pictures. This is one of a series of articles on preparing your images for uploading to your website.

There are dozens for image editing programs available for preparing your images to be published on the internet. Typically all of the programs accomplish the same task but they all work a bit differently in terms of what commands they use and their approach to carrying out the task.

As a result, MyArtClub has found a Windows based program which can be down loaded for free from the web. We have prepared a set of instructions for this program. If you don't already have the program, you can download it for free at:

http://www.irfanview.ca/main_download_engl.htm

This link shows a number of different sites where the program may be downloaded. If the link is out of date, try looking up "Irfanview download" in Google or another search engine.

In the last article we showed you how to crop your art. In this article, we'll deal with how to resize your art.

Why resize your images

There are two reasons why you need to resize your art images.

1. The images are easily loaded.
2. The images can't be used to reproduce your art illegally.

If you load large images of your art to your site, it can take many seconds, even minutes, for visitors to see these images when they come to your page. And research shows that visitors will not stick around on your site if it takes minutes to show your works of art.

As well, if you are loading a large image, it increases the opportunity for your image to be copied and used to produce it illegally. The computer screen typically requires only 72 dots per inch to view your image correctly and loading images of greater density doesn't increase the capability to view the image, only to be able to copy and reproduce it.

Our recommended size
MyArtClub recommends a size of picture between 50 KB and 140 KB for best viewing results. If you load a picture between 50 KB and 140 KB, then it protects your art picture from being copied since the work looks fine on the screen but will be grainy if someone should try to print it out. If you try to load an image file that is greater the 2MB (2,000KB), MyArtClub.Com will reject the file being loaded.

Resizing an image

If you are not carrying on from the last article, open up IrFanView, and then open your image file. Click on "file", then "open" and then search for an image you want to resize. When you have located the image, click on the "open" button.

Now click on "image", then "resize/resample" as shown below:

A menu box pops up to allow you to resize as follows:

For MyArtClub use, make sure the Units say "Pixels" as shown above, and then experiment with the Width and Height. You want either the Width to be 550 and height less than 450, or the height to be 450 and the width to be less than 550. By setting the pixels this way, you will reduce the size and as well be assured the size of the file is smaller,

MyArtClub automatically resizes all our images to be either 550 wide or 450 high. If you submit your image in these dimensions then we will not adjust it.

In this case, we adjusted the height to be 450, and the width is less than 550. MyArtClub uses these precise sizes to make it difficult for search engines or other automatic bots to capture your image. As mentioned above � to keep the file size down, and make it harder to print an unauthorized copy � we recommend setting the DPI (dots per inch - see in bottom left in the box above) to 72. Hit Ok.

Save the image file

Click on "file" and then "save as". Pick the directory to "Save in:" at the top left of the pop up menu. Put the new name of the image file in the "File Name;" space at the bottom of the menu. In order to see the size of the file we are saving, click on the the small box in the middle that the arrow is pointing to and select the "details" mode.

IrFanView also has a pop up box to adjust your quality settings as well on the right side. This is not the same as dimension resizing, but is a way to resize the file size, i.e. how many Kilobytes KB or megabytes MB it is. Less quality is less kilobytes. To adjust the quality you can move the slider bar at the top to increase or reduce the quality, and hence the file size.

Now you are done, but what is the new file size?

Click on "file" and then "save as" and look at the file size in the "details" mode. You can see the file is 161 KB. Now if you continue the "save as" but this time set the "Save Quality:" toolbar at 90%, you will further reduce the size of the file. Our target is ideally between 80kb and 120 kb.

You can do another "file", "save as" (or use the short cut key S) and show "details" to see what the new size is. Alternatively, you can have your file manager (windows explorer) open and monitor the file size that way. Once your file size is between our recommended settings, you are ready to upload your art.