Guidelines for Website Photos and Articles

NEW Douglas Hopwood has produced a step by step guide called The easy way to prepare pictures for the Rally Gallery which gives much more detailed guidance on the process outlined here.

Members have asked us to increase the size of photos in the Rally Gallery, so we've increased the longest dimension size in para. 6 below to 900 pixels. Thumbnails should still be 100 pixels high, with the width in proportion.

There is now no need to include captions with your photos, as you can insert them yourself. See para 8 below.

We welcome photographs and articles for the website, and we can accept most formats. However, if you could keep the following guidelines in mind, it would save the webmaster a lot of work:

1. DAN v. Website We prefer that articles appear in DAN before they appear on the website, as members have commented that they have already seen some of the contents of newly-published DANs. Please therefore send articles for DAN to the Editor, following the Specifications for DAN Articles. If you definitely want your article to appear only on the website, please read the advice below and send it to the Webmaster.
2. Articles Articles are best sent as plain text or as MS Word documents. If you have done a layout with text and pictures and it is important that it appears exactly as you have done it, the best format to use is PDF (Adobe Acobat). Budding web designers are of course welcome to send in complete web pages, but please try to conform to the style of the Drascombe Association website.
3. Diagrams and sketches. GIF (.gif) is the most suitable format for sketches and diagrams. As with JPEGs, please restrict the longest dimension to 550 pixels.
4. Photos - Sending When sending photos by email, please put them in a compressed (.zip) folder. How to do that:
   
   a. Copy the photos you want to send to a new folder.
   
   b. If you have MS Windows XP, right click on the folder in Explorer and choose Send To, then Compressed (zipped) Folder.
   
   c. If you have other versions of Windows you will need a utility program such as WinZip or one of the free Zip programs available on the Internet.
5. Photos - Saving When you are preparing photos, avoid saving them as JPEG more than once, as there is a loss of quality each time a photo is saved in this format. It's best to work in a lossless format such as TIFF and save as JPEG when you have finished.
6. Photos - Size If you know how to resize photos, make the longest dimension of all photos 900 pixels - save them as .jpg files with a compression factor of 15 (85%).  It helps when producing thumbnails for the gallery page if all the the photos in your batch have the same proportions, as we can then produce them as a batch rather than have to do each photo individually. It also saves time if you can add the suffix _P to the filenames of photos which are in Portrait format rather than Landscape (eg poole11_P.jpg). However, if you supply the thumbnails yourself, you can use whatever proportions you like (within reason!) and there is then no need to add the _P suffix to portrait format photos.
   
• Resizing depends a bit on the photo-editing program you're using.  Some offer a 'Resample' option that gives better results than a straight resize.  PaintShop Pro has a 'Smart Size' option which chooses the best algorithm for you.  If your program offers 'Weighted Average' as a resize or resample option, that is usually the best one to use for photos.  Some programs offer named filters (such as Lanczos, Bicubic, or Hermite).  The program normally suggests the best one to use, but, if it doesn't, try them out to see which gives the best results.  You should also tick the box for 'Maintain aspect ratio' which most programs offer. A touch of 'Unsharp Mask' (usually found under 'Adjust Sharpness') after resizing helps to restore sharpness.
7. Photos - Thumbnails If you have managed to resize the photos as described above, please also supply a thumbnail of each photo in a sub-folder called 'thumbnails'.  All thumbnails should be 100 pixels high, with the width in proportion.  Each thumbnail should have the same filename as the full size photo. A good freeware tool for resizing and creating thumbnails is Irfanview from http://www.irfanview.com/.
   
   See The easy way to prepare pictures for the Rally Gallery by Douglas Hopwood.
8. Photos - Captions There is now no need to include captions with your photos, as you can insert them yourself. When we have uploaded your photos, we will send you an email with a link to a form where you can enter captions.
9. Photos - Order If you want a series of photos to appear in a specific order, please make that clear in your accompanying email or, even better, number the filenames sequentially (poole01.jpg, poole02.jpg, etc) in the order in which they should appear. If you want the photos to appear in the order that you took them, the filenames generated by your digital camera are quite acceptable. Please avoid spaces in file names.
10. Photos - The Let-Out Clause If all of the above is gobbledegook to you, just send the photos in whatever format you can - we do want them! Just bear in mind that this involves the webmaster in a lot of work, so there may be a delay before your photos appear on the website.
11. If you have any questions, please contact the webmaster first.

Please send photos and articles to webmaster _AT_ drascombe-association.org.uk.

Updated on 21 October 2006

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