Imagine Online Images Getting from Here to There Scott Koegler
You've taken pictures with your digital camera and managed to transfer them to your computer. The software that came with the camera makes it simple enough to organize them on your computer and print them, but one of the benefits of digital pictures is the ability to display them on the Internet. But moving them to the web may not be part of the camera's software package, and even if it is, your requirements may be different.
There are all kinds of reasons to put digital images online, ranging from showing off your child's birthday to displaying product shots for your eBay auctions or Yahoo! store. You may even want to sell your photographs. Not surprisingly, there's a monstrous selection of software products designed to ease the job of putting your pictures online.
Getting from Here to There
For a number of reasons, the digital image you have on your computer is unlikely to be the right quality, size, format, or filetype for your intended online purpose. That's where the proper software tools and services come in and make your publishing tasks easier.
File size
Digital cameras have been increasing the pixel count in an effort to deliver higher quality images, and this is exactly what is needed if you intend to print them. But even an inexpensive digital camera can create image files that are larger than 2 megabytes (MBs) — a size that's simply too large for use as a web image in almost all cases. As a result, digital camera images need to be modified to retain their image quality while bringing the size down to around to 100 KB.
Image dimensions
The size of your image file is related to the area it occupies on the web page. Even if the web page is programmed to automatically reduce the size of the image, the entire file still needs to be downloaded before it can be displayed, and the time required for it to download can be frustrating to your audience, especially those with slower Internet connections.
Again, digital cameras typically produce image files that are much larger in terms of dimensions than what you'll likely want to publish on the web. So, in addition to scaling back the file size of the image, the image's actual size will typically need to be scaled down as well.
Image quality and contents
The picture you had in mind when you pushed the shutter button may not be the picture the camera captured. Image editing tools help here as well, with basic image editing options such as cropping, brightness and contrast adjustments, red-eye removal, and a wide variety of special effects available to help enhance your images. The ability to use your computer monitor to quickly and easily change the way a digital image appears is one of the most important advantages to using a digital camera.
