How To Move Images From Your Digital Camera to Your Website
January 15th, 2009 by Clay
photo credit: loganberrybunny
One of the clients I’m currently developing a site for is an Indianapolis remodeling and construction company, Maxson. The most important part of their site is the galleries where they show before and after pictures of remodeling jobs they’ve completed. Maxson is a great candidate for a content management system because they want to be able to regularly add pictures of new projects they’ve completed to the site.
So I created a site that allows them to upload pictures at any time. There is a catch, though. When you take a picture with a digital camera it is usually extremely large. (This is a good thing because you can always make a picture smaller, but making it larger can result in reduced image quality.) The images straight off your camera are far too large for use on a website. I do a little resizing in the background when an image is uploaded, but if an image is too large the web server will reject the image before the entire thing gets uploaded.
Sites like Flickr spend a lot of money on great hardware and bandwidth that allows them to handle very large photos, but that’s expensive. The solution for Maxson is to make the images a little bit smaller before uploading them to the web server. In this case shrinking them to 20% of the original size does the trick, but it will vary depending on the settings of your digital camera.
How do you resize your photos? Most digital cameras come with some software that will allow you to do this. Retail versions of Photoshop Elements are available if you have a little money to spend. You can also experiment with free online services that resize your photo like Pic Resize, but you’ll likely run into some of the same issues of a picture being too large to be uploaded to a website in the first place.
