Creative and Expert WordPress Web Design Atlanta and the World
1. Log-in and go to your main Gmail page.
2. Click the gear in the top right of your Gmail and select “Settings.” (pictured below)
3. On the top of your settings page you’ll see a navigation menu. Towards the end of this menu you’ll see “Labs”–click that. We are turn on a “Lab” that allows you to Insert Images into Gmail email [Read more...]
You know how it is. You are writing a blog post and you need a fast image. Step away from Google Images where you will most likely end up stealing an image from someone else’s site. You really cannot use copyrighted materials without the permission of the copyright holder. It is not cool.
But not to worry, there are alternatives.
Usually, artists and photographers copyright their work and charge for the use of it. But more and more people are getting on the bandwagon of allowing others to republish their work with attribution under some conditions. You can read Laurence Lessings book, Free Culture which is by the way, totally free by downloading it right here. In the book, Lessing discusses the need for society to allow its people the freedom to create, freedom to build, and ultimately, freedom to imagine.
But I digress. There are several sources to search for reusable media. Creative Commons License, GNU Free Documentation License and the public domain are sources of photos, images, movies and documents available for you to use absolutely free. Here is how.
You may want to help this Creative Commons movement along by going to Flickr and changing your license to a Creative Commons license. Most people just put the normal “All Rights Reserved” copyright on their Flickr photos not knowing that there is an alternative. That’s why if I find an image I like on Flickr I will contact the owner and ask permission to use it with attribution. People are usually really glad you asked and permission is usually given.
Sometimes you can’t find what you need through these free sources. If I need an image or illustration for a client’s logo or header image I will often look through artists’ work online. If I find something, I contact them and ask to pay them for the use of their image for my client. I actually created my New Tricks logo from a painting of a dog I found online by Walter Sallas, whose site is called, Walter’s Dogs. When I asked Walter if I could use it he readily agreed and asked me to send him something to his Paypal account. I love my dog and was very generous.
And lastly, there are stock photo sources such as Dreamstime, Shutterstock and Veer where you can buy images for a few dollars a piece since usually you need only the smallest size with a 72 dpi to post online.
Working with ImagesOne of the biggest problems non-graphic artists have when learning to maintain their websites is the whole issue of working with their images. Web 2.0 sites really rock with photos and images to demonstrate a topic or can be used in a long blog post to break up text into manageable sized chunks.
It helps to know a bit about file types. If you don’t know your JPEGs from your GIFs image formats, this is for you. First, lets talk about file compression.
There are basically two ways of saving images, lossy or lossless (no, I didn’t make those up). If an image is saved in a lossy image format, it means the format being used discards some of the “unimportant” image information. However, the resulting image file is smaller. Lossless retains ALL the image information. OK, now that you know that, here’s an overview of the [Read more...]
Many of you have lots of photos in your computer files and find that they are too large to quickly upload to your website. The first thing you can do to help with the problem is to adjust the settings of your camera. Most cameras these days can take pictures that are Ginormous. Unless you are a professional or want to use photos for large prints you can adjust your cameras to a smaller resolution. But if you want to keep your pixels huge then I have another fast solution.
Download the free program Picture Resizer. It is an easy way to re-size your jpgs.
On the program home page there are choices you can make about the way you want the photos re-sized. These choices are changed in your program by renaming the program icon on your desktop. Just go to the desktop and right click and change the name to whichever choice you’d like to make. I used the one that makes the maximum width 400 px and keeps the proportions of the original photo.
Images are an important component to a good blog post. They give a reader a first hint of what the article is about and they can set the tone. Using a visual can break up the text in posts that may otherwise feel too long and they just add a bit of polish to a post and to the site.
It’s easier now than ever to find free images for your blog. One of my favorite sources for images is Flickr. Some of the images have a Creative Commons license that allows the sharing of photos, with some restrictions. Dreamstime is another favorite place to go to hunt images. The photos and images are available at very low price especially when you will only need the 72 dpi resolution option since it is for the web.
Here are seven tips on adding images to your blog posts:
img.alignleft { float: left; margin: 0 25px 15px 0; }
img.alignright { float: right; margin: 0 0 15px 25px; }
