Uploading your Photos is Child's Play!

Uploading photographs to Castlebar.News is as easy as copying files on your own computer. 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)
• We have set an upper size limit of 150kb on individual photographs to be uploaded.  This is in order to ensure that they download (and upload) in a reasonable time.
• Ideally photos should be less than 60kb if they are to be viewed by 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)
• 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 not be more than 600 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 60kb or less will usually give very effective results for the web.

  We want your Photos

• 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.
• 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.

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