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We Want Your Photos
16, Mar 2010 - 08:51

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Will you take photographs at the St. Patrick's Day Parade or any other event during the year?  Why not share them with Castlebar and Mayo by uploading them to Castlebar.ie?

Did you know that Castlebar.ie had over 3 million hits last month? We had over 160,000 separate visits last month with many returning repeatedly - i.e. over 5000 separate visits per day. Most of our readers are based in Mayo or have Mayo links around Ireland or abroad so it's the website where your contributions will be noticed if you are Mayo-based or have links with Castlebar.

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Uploading your Photos is Child's Play!
Uploading photographs to the Castlebar website is almost as easy as copying files on your own computer.

There are three ways to do this

1. You can simply email the photos to info@castlebar.ie with some details about the photos and we will put them onto Castlebar.News or the Photo Gallery for you. Try to keep them to a reasonable size though before emailing them - see below for some hints and tips.

2. Login to Castlebar.News using guest as the username and guest as password if you don't already have a login. You can have your own username password by just emailing us and requesting a login. There are a number of articles explaining how to use our content management system.

3. You can register on our DIY Gallery, login and upload your photos there.

Some hints on Processing your Photos for the Web:

A few simple steps in preparing photographs for uploading will ensure a smooth operation. Hopefully these few pointers will be useful to those who have not put photographs on the web before.

  • Photographs are best saved as jpgs  (i.e. don't use GIFS, BMP or TIFFs) (use the jpeg setting on your digital camera)
  • We have set an upper size limit of 1MB on individual photographs to be uploaded to Castlebar.News.  This is in order to ensure that they download (and upload) in a reasonable time.
  • Most digital cameras now have an option to reduce the photos to a size suitable for emailing or putting on the web.
  • Ideally photos should be less than 100kb (there are still people on dial-up Internet connections). The two photographs in this article are a mere 11k and 15k in size and 268 pixels wide - right click them for details.
  • But much larger photos can be uploaded to the Castlebar Photo Gallery
  • Some cameras and particularly scanners can produce very large files many times bigger than the above so it is necessary to resize and reduce the image's size.
  • Use the resize image option in your image handling package - most scanners and digital cameras have software bundled with them which will allow you to do this quite efficiently. Of course you may have a more elaborate package such as Photoshop or Paintshop Pro. In any case your final image width should ideally be not more than 640 pixels wide.
  • Be careful to preserve your own original images - don't overwrite the high quality image with the reduced size image for uploading.
  • In addition to resizing you can compress the image when saving as a jpg file. Most image handling software packages have a slider that allows you to select the quality of the image from low to high. Experiment with this in order to achieve a good balance between final file size and image quality. A target of 100kb or less will usually give very effective results for the web.
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    We want your Photos
  • If you are unsure about the size of a photograph you can use Windows Explorer with "view details" turned on to check out the size of your final photograph file or right click on the image and view its properties to see the file size.
  • Don't put spaces in the file name as some browsers are unable to view files that have spaces in their names. It is also a good idea to put a meaningful name on the photos that you are uploading - but not too long.
  • Amazing improvements in photo quality can be achieved by adjusting the 'levels' of your photograph - this option may be called different things in different packages but e.g. in Photoshop adjusting using the "auto levels" menu option is highly effective at brightening up photos that at first sight seem impossibly dark.
  • There are some online image processing pages that can do great things with your photos - Pix.ie and pixenate.com are just two examples of free online photo manipulation sites.

For further details on using Castlebar.News check out our article outlining the nitty gritty of the menus for uploading files.



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