The easy way to prepare pictures for the Rally Gallery

by Douglas Hopwood

I wrote this because the number of folk who post pictures on the Rally Gallery is relatively few and I worry that the preference to prepare them for the web may put some folk off. What I set out here is one way of doing it with excellent free software which has batch processing facilities.

Before you say "that looks complicated" and go back to the television remember that provided you don't have to design it, even making a airliner is just a lot of simple steps put together in the right sequence with the right tools and this is a lot simpler than that.

Experts - get Irfanview off the web, prepare your pictures and jump to item 3. below to find the batch processing stuff.

Get "Irfanview"

Type "Irfanview" into Google or type www.irfanview.com into your browser (e.g.. Microsoft Explorer). This will take you to Irfan Skiljan's Irfanview home page.

Select "Download" from the sidebar on the left - not from the Tucows advert. This should offer you a list of sites where you can download Irfanview. I choose "File forum" because Tucows wanted me to download a package with other files I did not want.

When you start the download you should be offered the option to run or save a 1.1 MB file called iview400_setup.exe (or it was for version 4).

The simplest option is to run the file which will install Irfanview on your system. If you choose to save the file first and then run it, make a note of where you save it. You may have to OK warning dialogues from your firewall or virus checker but it should be OK to allow the download unless your security software says that there is definitely a specific virus or other problem.

During the installation when choices are offered you can accept all the defaults.
You may for example be offered a default of saving to a downloads folder or the desktop folder. I don't associate any file extensions with Irfanview, 'cos I use other programs for editing my pictures and Irfan just for viewing and managing them. If you want to use Irfanview's editing functions as your main image editor then associate at least the jpg file extension.

I choose not to install any other programs such as "Google Desktop search" which Irfan offers me and I accept the default location for Irfan to install itself (the Program Files directory on the C: drive).

When you first run the program it may offer you the "frequently asked questions" in a browser window. You can view or close this. The Irfanview window itself appears quarter screen or less with a black working space. There is nothing much you can do with it though until you give it some pictures to work with so close it for now.

Whilst you are about it, if you have broadband, you can download the plug-ins too as they are very worthwhile additions although the download is larger at 5.69MB. The simplest way to do this is to look for the file "irfanview_plugins_400_setup.exe" (the alternative file "irfanview_plugins_400.zip" requires a couple more stages). Again chose to RUN rather than save the file, and accept the default choices. When the download is finished, running the program only takes an instant.

Import your photos.

First connect the camera with the pictures on it to the computer (typically with a USB lead) or use a card reader (a few quid from EBay or sometimes Tescos) in order to save the camera battery. If you have a new computer it may have a card reader built in so you can just put the memory card in the slot.
You can use the software that came with your camera to transfer the pictures to your computer or, if you have Windows XP or later, you can use Irfanview itself.

The plan I am going to suggest is this:

1. Copy the pictures to a new folder called (say) "Poole Drascombe Rally". Here you save all your originals.
2. Copy all the pictures to a subfolder called (say) "Selected Rally Pics". Here they will be cropped or deleted and processed any way you want.
3. Shrink the selected and cropped pictures to Web Size and save them in yet another sub folder called (say) "Poole Rally for Web".
4. Thumbnails will be put in a subfolder of "Poole Rally for Web" called "thumbnails".
5. 3 and 4 will be combined into a compressed folder to send to the webmaster.

To use Irfanview to transfer the pictures to your computer:

First open the Irfanview thumbnails program (Panda Icon) and create the new folder. Using the directory tree, select the "documents and settings, your user name or all users, my documents, my pictures" folder and right click. Select "Create subfolder" and type (say) "Poole Drascombe Rally". Whilst you are about it, select "Poole Drascome Rally", Right click, create subfolder and type (say) "Selected Rally Pics". Now you've got the idea you can select "Selected Rally Pics" and make a subfolder of that called "Poole Rally for the Web" and then a subfolder of that called "thumbnails".

Now navigate down the directory tree to your camera or card. It will probably be called "Removable disk something or other". You may have to delve down a level or two to find your pictures which should now appear in Irfanview as thumbnails. It may take a moment or two for them all to appear as the camera or the memory card are the slowest link in the chain.

1. Now, in the directory tree on the left, navigate to the "documents and settings, your user name, my documents, my pictures, Poole Drascombe Rally" folder and make sure that it is visible. In the Thumbnail window type "Ctrl A" or on the top menu select "Options", then "Select all". With all the thumbnails selected, left click and drag them onto the "Poole Drascombe Rally" folder. When the copying has finished you can disconnect the Camera or take out the memory card as the pictures are now in the master folder on your hard disk.

Select and tidy your pictures

2. In the directory tree select the "Poole Drascombe Rally" folder. When the thumbnails appear you can delete any obvious duds that you don't want at all but I prefer not to delete duplicates or partial failures from the master folder at this stage in case they have some redeeming feature that I might later decide I need.. Now, in the Thumbnails window, type "Ctrl A" or on the top menu select "Options", then "Select all" just like before. With all the thumbnails selected, left click and drag them onto the "Selected Rally Pics" folder. Now select the "Selected Rally Pics" folder and when all the copy thumbnails have appeared you can process the pictures.

a) To delete a picture you don't want on the Web Site, just select the relevant thumbnail and press the delete key. To choose between alternatives, select the candidates (Ctrl Click the thumbnails, or shift click the first and last of a contiguous group) and right click on one of the pictures (if you click anywhere else you will deselect the images and have to select them again), then choose "Start slideshow with selected files". Use the arrow keys to go forward and back in the slide show and make a note of the ones to delete then "Esc" to exit the slide show and delete them.

b) To get a picture into Irfanview proper for editing, just double click on the picture's thumbnail. Note that after editing and saving the picture in Irfanview, you will not see the thumbnail change as it will not be updated until you re-select the folder after selecting a different one.

c) To crop an image in Irfanview - just left click and drag. This will draw a box. Draw the box around the interesting part of the picture and select "Edit", "Crop Selection" from the top menu. If you are not happy, press "Ctrl Z" then try again. Sometimes people in a boat look more interesting than the whole boat - the top of the sails can often be cropped with impunity to make the real subject bigger. Keep an eye on the pixel count in the bottom left of the Irfanview screen. If the long side goes below 900 you will lose resolution which may be an issue or not according to the subject.

d) To rotate a picture that you took with the camera on its side, in Irfanview, choose "Image", "Rotate Right" (or Left) and save the picture. To rotate a picture that is simply not straight, in Irfanview select "Image", "Custom/fine rotation" from the top menu and type in a number of degrees. A thumbnail preview will be offered and pressing "OK" will straighten the big picture. If you are not sure that it is straight, left click and drag to draw a box that has one of its sides adjacent to a reference in the picture e.g. the horizon or a lamp post, so you can judge how far out of level the picture is. With snapshots it will often be impossible to get important horizontals and verticals all straight together and you will have to accept what best pleases the eye. Finally, before saving the image you need to crop the wonky edges. The box you draw by clicking and dragging will always be a perfect rectangle.

e) Techniques to rescue a badly exposed picture fill books galore but to lighten an image taken on a dull day first try : "Image", "Enhance Colours" and change the Gamma Correction factor to 1.43. The golden rule for image enhancement is don't overdo it - just a little tweak at a time otherwise the result looks false but by all means learn by playing with the available options. By the way, different image processing programs react very differently. What works well in Photoshop doesn't in Irfanview and vice-versa. For the Rally Gallery I seldom do more than the basic editing explained here.

Shrink to Web Size (experts start here)

3. Now to make all our pictures "Webmaster friendly". All the selected and possibly cropped and processed pictures are in the "Selected Rally Pics" folder and we are going to put the shrunken versions in "Poole Rally for the Web". The way we do this is first to ensure that we have the "Selected Rally Pics" folder open in the Ifanview thumbnails window and then select all the images by typing "Ctrl A" or on the top menu selecting "Options", then "Select all" just like before. Next, right click on one of the selected images (Remember that if you click anywhere else you will deselect the images and have to select them again) and from the menu that appears choose "Start Batch Dialogue with selected thumbnails". (see Screenshot) .

In the batch conversion dialogue which follows, change nothing except for the Output directory and advanced options. Use the Browse option to select the folder where you want your shrunken files to end up. If you have followed the example it will be something like "C:\Documents and settings\your user name(or all users)\My documents\ my pictures\Poole Drascombe Rally\Selected Rally Pics\Poole Rally for Web". A long folder address like this is impossibly long to type without error but no problem to select from the menu tree if you take it a step at a time. Then check the "Use advanced options" box and your screen should look like this (with different file and folder names of course).

When you checked the "Use advanced options" box the "Set advanced Options" button will have become available. Click this and on the screen that appears change nothing except :

Check the "Resize box" (second section top left). Then click the "Set Long Side to" radio button and put "900" (without the quotes) in the box right next to "Set Long Side to" and make sure that the "Pixels" radio button is selected as the measurement.

Underneath the Width and Height stuff are three check boxes labelled

"Preserve Aspect Ratio"
"Use Resample and"
"Don't enlarge smaller images"

Check all three of them.

Now, on the right hand side, leave all the "Other Options" and "Miscellaneous" boxes unchecked except check the last two - "Save files with original date/time" and "Apply changes to all pages". This last one has no effect on anything except multi page "tiffs" but it is checked by default so why not leave it that way.

Your screen should look exactly like this.

Now we are ready to go. Click "OK" to close the Advanced Options dialogue then click "Start" near the top of the Batch Conversions dialogue. All your selected pictures will automatically be shrunk so that their longest side is 900 pixels. We have now created the main pictures that the webmaster needs. A little window will appear with a list of conversions and a note of any errors. Click on Exit, the window will disappear and the focus will be on Irfanview.

Make the thumbnails

Nearly there now - Create the thumbnails in the same way. There is less choice of folder structure now, even for experts because the thumbnails folder must be called "thumbnails" and must be a sub folder of the folder that has the 900 pixel images. Go back into Irfanview's thumbnail screen and navigate to the folder with the 900 pixel images - in our example "Poole Rally for Web". It should be one level down from the folder we that we left Irfanview's thumbnail screen in. "Select all" the shrunken images and right click then invoke the "Start Batch Dialogue with selected thumbnails" command again. Change the destination folder by adding "\thumbnails" to the destination foldername that we just used. (Tip - click anywhere on the long folder name sequence and press "Ctrl" and "End" together to quickly get to the end of the name).

"Use advanced options should still be checked so click on the "Set advanced options" button. Click the "Set both sides to" button and enter 100 pixels in the adjacent "Height" box. Leave the width box blank and you don't have to delete the 900 pixels in the box below left over from the previous operation although you can if you wish. Otherwise the screen should look like this.

Click on "OK" , then "Start" in the Batch Conversion dialogue and when the box with the list and the (hopefully) "no errors" message click exit and the conversions are all done.

The final stage is to put the pictures and the thumbnails together in a compressed folder for the webmaster but before we do that it would be wise to check that all is well. In the Irfanview thumbnails window we should have the 900 pixel images in the (say) "Poole Rally for Web" folder. Hover the mouse over a couple of images and in the information note that appears, check that the long side is no more than or equal to 900 pixels. Now navigate to the "thumbnails" folder (should be the next level down), hover the mouse again and check that the images are all 100 pixels high.

Now close Irfanview Thumbnails and Irfanview if it is still open and right click on the Start button at the bottom left of your screen. From the list that appears choose "Explore" to open Windows Explorer. Now navigate down the tree until you can see both the folder with the 900 pixel images (say) "Poole Rally for Web" and its sub folder "thumbnails" in the RIGHT HAND pane. "Ctrl Click" on them both and then right click on them and choose "Send to" and then "Compressed folder". If these options don't appear, you didn't right click on the highlighted folders. A folder will be created with the name of the second folder and the extension ".zip". Right click on it and choose "Rename" then change its name to something more meaningful then right click again and choose "Send to" and "Mail recipient" and send the email to webmaster2 at the Drascombe Association domain. If send to mail recipient doesn't work then just open your email program and send an email to the Webmaster using "Insert", "File" to insert the compressed folder as an attachment.

The webmaster will send you an email with a link to add the captions then you're all done.

Webmaster's Note on Naming Picture Files

When I upload pictures to the Gallery, the uploading program automatically sorts them into file name order. If you took the photos with a digital camera, the best plan is to leave the filenames as they are. However, if you do want to rename the photos for any reason, please bear the following points in mind:

1. Avoid spaces in filenames.
2. The web server uses the LINUX operating system, which differs from Windows in being case-sensitive, so, for example, photo01.jgp is different from PHOTO01.JPG and will be sorted after PHOTO99.JPG. The way round this pitfall is to use the same convention throughout: all lower case, all UPPER CASE, or all with Leading Capitals.

If you do wish to rename all your picture files, Irfanview has a useful Batch Rename facility.

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