Forum Topic

I know it might be too optimistic to hope for a Web 2.0 appplication to manage photos on our stories. But there must be a better way to manage what appears in the top two photo slots on a story. It took a lot of head scratching and tinkering for me to figure out that if I wanted to make a a photo the new "default" on a story through the "moderate" tab, I had to delete a photo first. Otherwise, the requested change would n0ot take.

Please fix this and explore Web 2.0 interfaces to make it easier to do?

Thanks and cheers!

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alawisious

at 12:51 on January 4th, 2008

I'm a newbie here and am having total frustration trying to manage not just photos but all the other little ins and outs of writing a story, editing, adding, ensuring it goes where I want etc. I'm afraid in spite of being a great place to get a story out, this is like a lot of other websites, way too much and not simple enough. So it goes with technology generally. The techies don't know what it's like to be slow and plodding and have a slow computer and connection to boot.

Try as I might, I don't seem to be able to find a section in help for explanations about how to do things like upload a photo to my profile. It just won't take my photo and says it has, so there must be something going on with the size or file type or.....???????????????????????????????/

Heellllppp, please.

politisite

at 14:20 on January 7th, 2008

Hi:

Email me with the things you are trying to do. I became comfortable rather quickly and you will as well. If I can't help I wil refer you to someone who can. Sound good?

Barry Artiste

at 19:34 on January 10th, 2008

You know what would be nice is if online photos posted regardless of size can be automatically reduced through some sort of built in NP software in order to show the entire photo or caption within the body of the frame instead of half the photo, just an idea.

BTW I am not very techy with this stuff and assume others are not as well, but there has to be some sort of software to do this automatically.

Swan

at 09:17 on January 13th, 2008

Hello Alawisious, :)

Have you checked that the format of the image you're trying to upload complies with what is allowed? Now Public only supports: .jpg, .gif, .png, .mng, .bmp, .pic

So if you're trying to upload a picture with any other extension, it's not going to work. You'll need to use an image converter first and then you'll be able to upload.

Paint Shop Pro and Photoshop have that capability, or you can use a stand alone converter like Image Badger. I'm sure there are plenty of open source products out there too.

I always plug open source as opposed to "free software," which can often be referring only to a trial version.

I hope that helps,
~ Swan

Swan

at 09:23 on January 13th, 2008

Oh!

I forgot to mention that the photograph or image cannot exceed 150MB. So check your compression when you convert. Use a copy (always work on a copy!) and save to the format you wish, but try not to compress too much, or you'll end up with artifacts that look pretty messy. Compress as little as possible to get to 150MB.

Take care! ;)
~ Swan

politisite

at 12:51 on January 14th, 2008

Photoshop has a, "save for the web" function. That would help. When I am in the field. my photos come out at 27 inches by ? I reduce the size to 8"

Barry Artiste

at 17:32 on January 14th, 2008

I reduce my manually in photoshop to less than 1 inch by 1 inch, any larger and the photo only display 50 percent. certainly sucks to lose resolution when shrinking your photo

Swan

at 08:33 on January 15th, 2008

Hello Barry,

If you happen to have Adobe Fireworks (my new best friend!) their scaling tool perfectly reduces or increases the size of an image without any resolution loss. My normal preference is to convert images to .png, since it's the only format (other than .gif) that produces transparent lossy images.

To create perfectly uniform thumbnails, I use Express Thumbnail Creator. Hope this helps too. ;)
~ Swan