More and more people start a blog as a way to express themselves and communicate with other people. While there are many text-only blogs and this is perfectly acceptable, most blogging software allows to make your blog a richer experience by adding images and multimedia to your pages. Some people add images to their blogs on special occasions like vacation, graduation, or marriage, while other people add images whenever they can.
Preparing the images for your blog is not very difficult and even if you are not a master of digital processing, there are easy to use programs, like ImageConverter, which you can use to prepare the images for your blog. Basically, the steps to follow when preparing images for your blog are these:
- Acquire the images. It is obvious that you can’t add images to your blog, if you don’t have them. There are many ways to acquire images and this affects (at least to some extent) what you need to do to turn them blog-ready. For instance, if you acquire your images from a digital camera, or scan them, it is very likely that they will need at least some processing before you can publish them. You can also purchase image packs, or download images for free and in this case you might not be able (even if you need) to process them because this could be a violation of their copyright permissions.
- Digitally process the images. You might be lucky to get images that you can publish directly but almost always images need some digital processing before you can publish them on your blog. Most often the kind of processing your images will need is related to their size and quality.
For instance, if your images are very large, you need to downsize them first. Sometimes you might need to enlarge them, but unfortunately image processing technology has its limitations and enlarging images is not always possible – or at least not without substantially damaging their quality.
In addition to resizing your images, you might also need to darken or lighten them, to add text and other effects, to make them more focused or blur them, if you don’t want the details to be that visible. All these tasks are relatively easy to do, provided you have the right software. - Create thumbnails. This is an optional step and if you have just a couple of images per page, it is OK to publish them in their actual size. However, if you have many images (i.e. an image gallery) or the actual size can’t be decreased, creating a small thumbnail of the image will greatly improve the usability (and the time of loading) of your site.
- Upload the images to the server. After you are done with processing the images and the thumbnails are ready, the next step is to upload the images to the server. It is best to have a separate images directory that will hold all images (or even a separate images directory per article, if there are articles with many images) but you can also put the images in the root directory. Just pay attention to upload the images to the right directory.
- Check that everything is working. The last step is to make sure that everything is working fine. Check if the images are displayed properly (i.e. no links are broken) and now you are ready to invite your friends to your blog.
Author: Ada Ivanova