Size Matters The size of the art image you want to display on your website is of some importance to artists. As digital cameras become more prevalent and produce images of larger size, it is necessary to resize your images so that: The images are easily loaded. The images can't be used to reproduce your art illegally. In spite of the fact the speed of the internet is increasing, 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 print it. Our recommended size MyArtClub.Com 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. What do Pixels do? Your art image is measured in pixels. Your camera may download images that are 2000 pixels by 1500 pixels. However when MyArtClub.Com displays your image, it is displayed as an image that is 550 pixels wide (if the image is a landscape format image i.e. wider than it is tall) or as an image that is 450 pixels tall (if the image is a portrait format image i.e. taller than it is wide). Therefore when you load your art images, MyArtClub.Com will automatically resize your image file to fit these dimensions. If your image is taller than it is wide, it will resize your image pixel dimensions to 450 high (and less than 550 wide); or if your image is wider than it is tall, it will resize your image to 550 wide (and less than 450 high). It will then save your resized image in order to obtain an image file size between our recommended size of 50 KB to 140 KB. Don't touch that pixel To prevent MyArtClub.Com from resizing your art images or adjusting the quality (compression), save your portrait format images with 450 pixels EXACTLY high (and less than 550 wide) OR your landscape format images with 550 pixels EXACTLY wide (and less than 450 high). Replacing your picture with a better image In order to replace one of your pictures with a better image, simply go into the maintenance for the current picture and upload the new image (it will be loaded over top of the old one). If your picture looks grainy MyArtClub.Com recommends a size of picture between 50 KB and 140 KB for best viewing results for visitors who come to view your art. If your art is smaller (under 25 KB) it will look fine in the thumbnails but grainy when you look at it on the art page. If it is bigger than that (over 200 KB), it will take a long time to load (especially for people who are looking at it on lower speed lines). 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. Replacing a picture with a new picture To replace the current picture with a new image, simply upload the new picture over the old one and then go into the art basic information and replace the existing descriptions with the description of the new art. Delete a picture from your site To delete a picture from your site, simply upload a new image over the old one and then go into the art basic information and replace the existing descriptions with the description of the new art. However, if you don't have a new work of art to replace the old one, you can use the delete function to remove the art work from your site. Later, when you are ready, load a new work of art in place of the deleted old work, and it will automatically show the new art image. Don't forget to update the description of the art image. read more ...

In a previous blog Building your email list we discussed how to create and maintain your email list. Also discussed on our previous blog Loading your art images on the web we discussed how to properly size your images for loading on your web site. In this blog, we discuss how to bring the two events together. When you have loaded your image to your website, we present you with the opportunity to send out an email to your email list touting your latest accomplishments. By clicking on the link presented, you can send out an predefined email with links back to your site as well as to the image you just loaded. You can also add your own message to the email inviting folks to view your image or using it as a marketing email to invite folks to your latest exhibition or an art show, perhaps referencing the art image as one of the pictures that will be included at the event. 'Content is King' they say on the Internet, so be sure to keep your site up to date. Go through your pages to remove out of date content. Why not display some of your more recent art? Will you be showing soon? Use the MyArtClub.Com email tool to send your fans a link to your latest works and invite them to your show. Selling art cards for Christmas? Send an image to your email list with your order information. Create some interest with your clients! This article was first published in the My Art Newsletter #8 read more ...

Imagine being able to resize an entire folder of images, even a whole CD ROM of images, all at once! The "Photo Resizer", will do just that, creating a new folder with the correct format and size all ready in one place for you to upload to your MyArtClub website. The AMAZING "Photo Resizer" utility The "Photo Resizer" was made available for free on the web from EMCO Software, a software vendor of remote administration and management solutions, headquartered in Reykjavik, Iceland. The software has since been withdrawn and is no longer supported. However, the software is still available to MyArtClub artists and is available for download from your artist member page. How to use "Photo Resizer" Login to your member site. Click on the link "Download our help manual" and then click on the link at the bottom of the page to download the software. Install the software on your computer. The following paragraphs show you how to use this utility to resize your art images, your artist picture, your signature file and your object images. Easy as 1 -2 -3! Crop and orient your images. Use your photo editing program to review and adjust your images in your directory. In this step, crop the image close to show only the art image, and rotate if required to the correct orientation. Save your files into the directory you will use in step 2 as the "source" directory. Set up the Photo Resizer Software Open up the "Photo Resizer" and setup the software. Set the source directory of your art images under the "Path Settings: Read images from:" text input box. The program sets up a destination directory automatically. When you select your directory of images to read from, the Photo Resizer updates the "Save Images to:" text input box to the same directory but adds a new directory Resized underneath your directory. Details: Normally this is fine, but you can change this directory to another location if you wish as long as it is not the same as your input directory. You will need to choose a C drive directory if you are using a CD ROM as source of images. Set the "New JPEG compression" factor (try between 80 and 90 % compression) by sliding the bar to the left or right. This control modifies the physical size of the images that you create. Make sure the "Aspect ratio" is selected as 1:1. For your art images, set the "Max. image width" to 550. Set the "Max. image height" to 450. To resize your art images, click on the Resize button. Process your art images with the Photo Resizer Open up your source directory using Windows Explorer e.g. the directory c:art If Windows Explorer doesn't show you the size of your file, then adjust your settings. In order to see the size of the image, you may have to click on the menu bar "View" option and then click on the "Details" item. Or you can click on the symbol on the right and then click on details. When you click on the Resize button in step 7 above, the photo resizer processes all the images in your source directory and creates the output images in the destination directory. When the photo resizer is complete, look in the destination directory, again using Windows Explorer. All you photos should now be listed with the size showing in KB beside the name. You may need to run the Photo Resizer with different compression values (step 3 above) in order to determine the appropriate setting to get the physical file size you want. Remember you want between 50 and 140 KB - ideally around 80 - 100 KB. If your resulting output images are too small or too large, move the "New JPEG compression" button to the right for slightly higher or to the left for slightly lower sizes respectively. Once you have an image of the right size, move it to another directory so it doesn't get overwritten. MyArtClub.Com settings summary for Photo Resizer: For resizing your Art images set "Max. image width" to 550 (step 5 above). Set the "Max. image height" to 450 (step 6 above). For resizing your Artist picture image or object images set the "Max. image height" to 250 (step 6 above). For resizing your Artist signature image, set the "Max. image height" to 200 (step 6 above). To process only a few files or one file at a time using Photo Resizer, first create a new directory and put only the files you want to process in that directory. When you have processed a file, move the output file from the /Resized/ directory to a new directory so it won't be overwritten. This article was first published in the My Art News Letter #14 read more ...

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. Crop your images One of the best ways to show your art on the web is to be able to crop your image so that the viewer is not distracted by the frame or other background that takes away from the art. Open your image First start the program IrFanView and open up a file. Click on "file", then "open" and then search for an image you want to crop. When you have located the image, click on the "open" button. The folliwing picture shows the menu when the "file" link is clicked to expose the "open" function and the image that loaded. The short cut key is also shown. You can get to the "open" function by clicking on the letter "o". Crop your image To crop, first put your mouse on one corner of the image (e.g. the top left corner) and hold the left mouse button down. Then while holding the left mouse button down, drag the mouse down to the opposite right bottom corner. You will see a rectangle has formed around the image. It may look like this when you let go of the mouse button: You can work with the edges, by clicking on an edge of the rectangle; you can move each edge in or out of the image. In this way you can optimize each edge to get the most of the picture included. MyArtClub recommends that you don't leave any of the background, as clean lines look best. As well don't try to show the frame. It is best to just focus on the image. Once you have got about the most of the image defined, now you are ready to complete the crop operation. Click on the link "Edit" and then the "Crop Selection" as shown in the following picture. Or you can use the short cut keys by pressing the "Ctrl" key and the "Y" key at the same time. Now your image is cropped by eliminating everything outside of the box. It now looks like this: Save your image Now you need to save the file. MyArtClub recommends that you don't save it with the same file name � as that would overwrite the original. So perhaps append the word "� cropped" to the end of the file name. Or even better, save the images in a separate folder of art, e.g. called "MyWebArt" making it easier to find the images when you are ready to load them up to your website. In the next article we will show you how to overcome the next biggest challenge for loading your art on your website - resizing your art image so that the images are easy to load and view by your website visitors. read more ...

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. The images are easily loaded. 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. read more ...

The image you show on MyArtClub.Com as your FIND ARTIST image is something you have control over. The image is selected automatically as the first image you load up. However, this image can be easily changed once you have loaded other images to be something you prefer to highlight your artwork. Every once in a while it is worthwhile to change this image up, just to create interest. You can then see how this affects your traffic. A step by step review of the process is available. Please click here on the FIND ART change image instructions to download the adobe file. Then follow the brief steps to give this a try. Now you have control! read more ...

First, be sure you want to do this, it is a commitment, which we believe is worth the rewards. You build audience, and create a legacy of text based thoughts, focused on your audience. Not sure about having a blog, read our post about why. Best practices are to be regular, so try to commit to what you can do. Content should be authentic, helpful, and targeted. Imagine who you are talking to as you write. Use words that your audience would use to search for help or information about your topic. Activate your artist blog by visiting the artist options. Click on the top bar ARTIST,(as illustrated below) and then select menu item 5, "Artist Site Options". You will then see this page below. Put a 1 in the "Artist blog" square, scroll to the bottom of the page and click on the gray button "Update Artist Options" and you now have a blog! Your artist blog is automatically connected to your website. Posting an artist blog entry: Now that you have activated your artist blog, click on BLOG (see the upper red arrow illustrated below) and come to your main Blog menu. Here you can work with individual entries. On this page you can launch a new posting, see the lower red arrow. After launching a new post, you see this blank page below. Enter your text here. IMPORTANT: create your blog first in a separate word document on your computer. When you have it mostly done, copy the article, and paste it here. This avoids time out issues, and losing the blog post. As well in word programs you have the advantage of spell check. Be sure to hit the gray button "Add Blog Entry" or "Update Blog Entry"every time you change your text, or add an image. Once a blog is posted, the date is registered. Now add some HTML - the basics are simple � for example, the most common code is to use to create paragraph breaks. Much more on this here Just as with all the text boxes on your artist website, this lets you create links to other references, and images! Spice up your MyArtClub blog with images! Images can be placed in your MyArtClub blog using the utility we have built in to your blogs. Add as many of your art works can be loaded in, here is how: Enter text above where you want the picture. Click "Update Blog Entry" to save. Click on "to add image" Select image to load Under the image to load, choose "Display on Left" or "Display on Centre" or "Display on right" as you wish You will see you then return to the blog page. You will see some text has been added to your blog text, this is the image data. Click Update Blog Entry to save revised text including the new image. Note you can now add more text, after the image too. Just add text below the image data, and remember to click "Update Blog Entry" gray button at the bottom to save. If you need to add space between image, or to spread out text, use the html paragraph spacer noted above. You can even add more than one image, and text following the above steps, as many times as you like. The effect is like a picture book. Imagine using it to show step by step of your image being developed! Use the Preview button to edit your blog. This is critical. You want to see how it looks, and check all your links and spacing. TIP: When you are done all your edits, copy the entire blog entry box, and save a copy on your word program - then you have all the html you figured out last time for your next time! Manage your blog posts:Click on the top BLOG menu to see your blogs. Here you can see postings by date. One very good promotional idea is to email your blog. This is an effective way to reach out to your community when you have a new blog. Do this using our built in tool available at the above page. Click on Send email. Here you can also manage comments received, and after you have a few blogs, you may want to visit this page one more time, and add tags. Have more questions about artist blogging? Let us know your ideas and issues, please comment below, or write to us at [email protected] Send us a request if you would like a copy of our word file with all the html that created this blog entry, it can serve as an example for you on using html, and multiple images. read more ...