REF – How To – General Images

Image Sizes:
Gallery: ( & General) 1200 pixels wide
Featured: 538 x 218 pixels

First – It makes life a lot easier if you have files and folders organised so you know where everything is…

1) Make a up a “Pre” folder where you can save the images from the camera that you are going to work with

Like …’ Web Site / Photos / Camera Photos / ‘

2) Make up a “Post” folder where you will store the images you have resized / cropped /rotated ready to upload to the site

…’ Web Site / Photos / Web Ready Photos / ‘

3) You can set these in PhotoFiltre – Tools / Preferences

 

=== Naming Photos ===

 

If you’re going to be working with photos from digital cameras you’re going to end up with a folder full of images called DSC176726254, DSC17673827 and so forth which is fairly hard to work with – (though if you just dump them into the “Pre” folder you can generally sort them by the Date Modified column to show the most recent at the top)

It’s better practice to give your images a name that will make sense to you (and the search engines) and makes them easier to find in future.

I would recommend that you use the plot-type-description or a format that suits the way you work. Also it’s good practice to avoid spaces and mixing Capitals & lowercase letters. “So This Is A Picture.jpg” would become “this-is-a-picture.jpg OR this_is_a_picture.jpg – Using hyphens – or underscores _ to replace the space character.   It’s not a Major issue if you forget to do this but it helps keep things tidy and some computers can be unforgiving as they see “This.jpg” and “this.jpg” as two separate things.

You are going to be using photos for the Main featured image (most likely the External view) and various images for the inside / gallery / slide show SO I would flag the featured / external image so you know where it goes…

i.e.   59m-willerby-external.jpg or 59m-willerby-2005-featured.jpg just to differentiate it from the other images for that van…

59m-willerby-lounge.jpg – 59m-willerby-kitchen.jpg – 59m-willerby-double-bedroom.jpg

OK – let’s set up the folder / preferences etc. and have a run through photofiltre with 3 or four images…

At a minimum you are going to want to resize any images to a max of 1200 pixels wide and Save As to rename it.

This will save you waiting hours for images to be uploaded then processed & resized by the server.

 

Featured Images

Featured Images can be treated slightly differently as they are more of a ‘letter box’ shape (538 px wide x 218 px high)

The software WILL attempt to crop a rectangular image into the smaller 538 x 218 size but may not do a very good job of it depending on the original photo. You may want to manually crop the image to suit once you get a bit more familiar with the software…

 

However for ordinary images…

1) Open a caravan ‘internal’ image for editing – The picture should now show in the main editing area…

2) Is it the right way up? use ‘Image’ – ‘Rotate’ until it is

3) resize it…   ‘Image’ – ‘Image Size’ and enter 1200 in the New size ‘Width’ box (the height should change automatically – size should be pixels Resolution should be 72.00 pixels/inch – Preserve aspect ratio = ticked and Optimise = ticked – You should need to do anything with these)

4) Save it & rename it… ‘File’ – ‘Save As’ (It SHOULD show the folder you set up in preferences in the Save In box at the top)

In the file name box type in your preferred name…. “59m-willerby-2005-lounge” etc. and Click ‘Save’

5) the next box is the Compression slider – this just ‘squeezes’ the image a bit to make it faster to upload/download on a computer)   Just slide the bar along until it reads Compression: 80… I think you only need to do this the first time as it will remember your settings

You should now see the image file in the ‘Post’ folder ready for uploading…   repeat with the various images until done…