Why Make Photos Web Friendly?
Reasons why you should make your photos web friendly.
When it comes to websites now a days they're populated with images and photos thanks to the ever developing web technologies and faster Internet speeds. Even with these advances in today's world we still face problems with photos and images on web pages. Some common reasons a photo or image needs to be made web friendly are as follows.

1. File size too big - Most photos directly from a camera are actually too big (in memory/file size) to be displayed on a website. Why is the file size so big from a camera...? Well, most camera want to give you the best quality picture and to do so requires a big file size. In fact most of photos from a camera are so big it will take a few minutes to download at high speed Internet access. Therefore, when the photos on a web page are too big in file size the result is a much slower loading web page - not something we want!
2. Dimensions incorrect - The dimensions of a photo taken from a digital camera are usually to large to fit on a web page. So many times what happens is that a web designer or novice website owner will just place it on their site not changing the dimensions of the photo by editing the image, but rather changing the display dimensions for the image within the web page's code instead. This is not good! The result is a distorted or pixelated picture due to improper image resizing.
   
3. Non cropped out objects - Lastly, many times a photo or image includes things we don't necessarily need our audience to see. These objects in our images deter our audience from receiving the photos message and take up unnecessary space. A web friendly photo would crop these objects out.

1. File size smaller - To make a files size of a photo or image smaller is called optimizing the photo. Generally what is done is that a image size is condensed by some computer program by making the image quality less but not not so much that it would be noticed by human eyes. There are actually hundreds of programs that do this. A few free ones are:
     - Faststone photo resizer
     - Picture Resizer 5
     - Online Image Optimizer
     - NetMechanic's GifBot
2. Dimension resizing - In order to get your photos resized so that they will fit on the web first you need to know what size they need to be in order to display correctly on your web page. This can be a bit tricky. The best thing to do is to ask your web designer what the size of the photos should be to fit in a given area on your website. Once you know that you can use a photo resizing program (like some of the ones mentioned above) and resize the photo to the correct size. Resizing a photo also will help reduce the file size!
3. Crop out unwanted areas - Many photos online contain things that take away from the message your photo is communicating. Removing such things is called cropping an image. Again there are many computer programs that can do this. Some freeware programs are:
     - Online Image Cropper
     - Microsoft Photo Editor (come with Microsoft Office, called Microsoft Office Picture Manager in Office 2007)
     - SeasideSoft Photo Cropper
     - Image Converter Plus
   

Final Words
Ending comments
Well I hope that helps you and your fight against spam. If you want to check out some other interesting websites related to this subject here are a few good ones.

www.ftc.gov/spam/ - report spam to the Federal Trade Commission and has lots of other information on spam.

www.spamcop.net - by reporting spam to this website you can help provide anti-spam related software with data about what types of emails are possibly spam related.

And as always, look for next week's newsletter where we hope to provide you with more useful tips and advice. If you have any suggestions about topics you would like to hear more about please send us an email with your thoughts.