Paula G. Web Design

When you’re updating a blog, website, or sending out an email newsletter, one of the great things you can do to personalize your message and make it look good is by adding images. It doesn’t have to be difficult or complex, but you do need to edit and save them appropriately if you want them to look good and work well on the web and in email. That means no more:

• Funny cropped picture
• Incorrect file types
• Incorrectly resized photos that look horribly unprofessional
• Massively large image files that grind your email to a halt

Working with images can be a career unto itself. Many fancy software programs exist for experts to do magical things. However, for the average person it is total overkill. For those quick do it yourself situations consider using a tool like Google Picasa. It is free and easy to use for your most basic image tasks.

The program allows you to work locally on your machine with your photos and you can work with and save images as bmp, gif, or png as a jpg files. What that means is you can save files for use on the web or in email newsletters in gif or jpg format. You can also do a variety of common tasks like removing red eye, cropping photos, and color correction.

My colleague and friend Karin Rex wrote a great tutorial on using Picasa. It will help you get started with just about everything you might want to do with basic image editing and sharing.

Keep in mind that whatever images you choose to use on your website, blog, or email newsletters you need to make sure you have the legal right to do so. Just because you see an image doesn’t mean you can use it (unless of course you took it yourself). If you’re not sure - check out this great article by Leah Maclean at Working Solo on “How to Use and Understand Flickr Images”. It talks about the Creative Commons license and copyright concerns.

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