The advancement in web technology and the deluge of free "cloud" applications has resulted in an explosion of web content generated by users "self-publishing" via do-it-yourself website utilities, Blogspot, Wordpress, Facebook, et al. Much of this publishing involves the loading and online display of pictures.

Many of my customers are keen to display images on their new web or blog pages. They are uploading the pictures directly out of the camera with no consideration for the file size of each of those pictures. This is a problem. It seems that every six months or so, digital cameras and phone cameras hit the market with more and more megapixel capability. These days, 10 megapixels is a pretty standard sensor rating even in small point-and-shoot cameras. Smart phone cameras are already entering the 5 to 8 megapixel range.

All these megapixels produce excellent digital pictures. They also produce digital files the size of buses. A single picture right out of today’s consumer cameras can easily be 3 megabytes or more in size. Pushing a 3 megabyte picture out of a blog page is roughly akin to pushing a shipping container through a letter slot. It may go through, but it will take the door and good part of the wall along for the ride.

There are two essential preparatory steps necessary to get a picture fit for web display before you upload the picture to your blog or other web display space. The process is called image optimization. (search "image optimization" for lots of how-to info and tools)

• Step 1 – re-dimension the picture to the actual dimensions in pixels that you want it to display once it is inserted in the web page. Keep in mind that the bigger the picture is dimensionally, the bigger its file size will be, even after compression.
• Step 2 – compress the final picture after you re-dimension it using an image optimizer utility that outputs to an image format suitable for display on web pages – usually jpeg, gif or png.

Web designers who use advanced image editing software like Photoshop, Fireworks etc. have access to optimization tools within these editors. Consumer grade photo editors also have image optimization tools but they are generally hidden away deep in the program and often don’t get found, learned or used by the casual photo publisher.

The good news is that now there are many good image optimizers available online or in the free image editing programs being made available for download. You just have to find them and use them.

One such program is Google Picasa™. It’s free, fairly easy to use and does a pretty good job of organizing your photos. It provides a fairly extensive, though basic, set of photo touch-up tools. It also has an image optimizer in it. Unfortunately, the optimization function can be hard to find for the causal user.

The video in this post is a quick guide to using Picasa to get a picture web-ready in just a few clicks. Do yourself a favour and learn how to optimize your pictures before you get that "over storage quota" notice or surprise bandwidth overuse charge from your web host.

PS. Think about optimizing before you send all those weekend party pictures as attachments to a single email on Monday morning. You probably are going to push the recipient’s mail box over quota and cause all their other incoming mail to bounce off until they can get your bloated picture files out of their mailbox. – How to win friends and influence people!

If you use Firefox or SeaMonkey as a web browser you may be interested in the ScribeFire browser add-on. It’s a pretty good basic editor for making up quick posts to your blog. Once installed in the browser, you call ScribeFire from the browser’s “Tools” menu. Included is an account setup wizard that makes connecting to your blog simple. (For Wordpress you need to first login to your admin area, choose Settings–>Writing. In the Remote Publishing Section, check the XML-RPC box.)

ScribeFire’s interface is easy to use and understand. A convenient and clear panel beside the editor window allows easy access to Blogs, Posts and Pages for straight forward review and revision. The minimal editor tool bar does include convenient utilities for adding YouTube Videos, regular hyperlinks, and images to your posts.

More information is available at http://www.scribefire.com/help/supported-services/

Near Tongue Creek Ranch west of Longview Alberta. The famous OH Ranchlands are just behind the hills.

This picture/post was made quickly and easily by using Windows Live Writer – a piece of free desktop software that is far superior to most blog-resident editors. Live Writer is markedly better for positioning inserts like photographs, videos etc. It will generate nice clean XHTML markup. With Live Writer installed on my laptop, creating and publishing posts that include media is a snap.

Working with the internal Wordpress editor gets old rather quickly. The small working window and the fact that Wordpress will “correct”  or otherwise change code that you manually enter into the html view gets annoying. Not having a table utility among the default editing tools is also bothersome – you need to install a plug-in to get it in there.

I like to get around the above limitations by using a more full-featured external editor to make up more complex pages/posts. I then just cut and paste the externally generated code into the html view in Wordpress. If you happen to be using a Mac, the free SeaMonkey browser suite has a nice, full-featured editor that works great for formatting up pages for pasting.

For Windows users, Windows Live Writer is a free download that allows you to author posts, connect and publish to one or several blogs. Its editor is comprehensive and very functional. It really comes into its own when you start arranging pictures or other media within your posts.

 I like using Windows Live Writer as a one-stop-shop for managing several blogs. Note that if you are using Live Writer with Wordpress, you will not be able to connect until you first login to your Wordpress admin area. Choose Settings, then Writing. In the Remote Publishing Section, make sure the XML-RPC box is checked.

At the bottom of the Northeast face of Mount Temple in the Lake Louise area, there is a wonderful little lake bounded by a high, but accessible pass into Paradise Valley to the West.

It’s a steep ascent but the views into Paradise Valley are drop-dead gorgeous and well-worth the climb. One day, as I was toiling up the avalanche path, this mountain goat appeared above me on the cliff bands and kept a close watch for several minutes as I slogged upwards. I finally figured out that he/she was posing and expected me to get out my camera and take the shot.

I frequently receive requests from clients who want to create and maintain their own photo galleries. The obvious freebies like Picasa Web Albums, Flickr, JAlbum are fine for a lot of uses, but clients are often fussy about integrating the photo galleries into their own web site themes.

Finding something that would meet all the customer criteria for ease of use in dealing with picture sizing, optimizing, uploading and ongoing self-management while being sufficiently “white label” enough to integrate into existing web sites was proving to be quite a challenge. After a lot of searching around on the web for gallery generators, I finally came across DPHOTO http://www.dphoto.com This is a “cloud-based” photo hosting service.  It seems to perfectly fill my extensive bill of requirements for absolute simplicity in creating and maintaining very clean and professional photo galleries that my non-technical customers can cope with on very little learning.

Despite the management simplicity, the DPHOTO service is packed with cool customization features making it very versatile. DPHOTO does charge hosting fees but these are very reasonable/affordable. DPHOTO offers a 30 day free trial so you can give it a no-obligation, full-feature test drive before subscribing.

Once the service is set-up it can be displayed through an iframe which can set into any given web page theme to display the galleries. Once the iframe and source link is set up, the customers can change/add/update galleries without ever going near their website templates or code.

To my mind, this is an excellent service so I hope it survives and thrives. Get yourself going with a quick sign-up for a free 30 day trial.

Spotted this little guy in the Highwood Pass area in Kananaskis Country south of Canmore, Alberta. The grizzly cub was intently chowing down on dandelions and paid no attention to me. Happily, I was some distance away and shot this with a telephoto lens. No sign of the mother but I didn’t hang around to find out if she was in the vicinity!

Grizzly sub-adult

One of my favourite places to spend time just hanging out and looking at the view. A view that really can’t been done justice in a photograph. Stormy day in the mountains… No problem, head over Highwood Pass out of the mountains toward sunny Longview, Alberta. Turn around and take a look back to the West. This spot is just a few minutes east of Highwood House overlooking the Tongue Creek Ranch.

Foothills & Canadian Rockies