Picasa Tutorial

Picasa you can get it here. It's free. There is now a beta version available for Mac users.
Okay how do you resize an image for the web.

The first thing to know is that when you take a picture with your digital camera the picture is made up of millions of little pixels, this means that when you print them you get good quality prints. Well the web doesn't work that way. And it wouldn't work at all if we were all putting big pictures on it. We need to optimise them before we put them up on the web.

Get your image file(s) from your digital camera or email attachment and save it into a folder on your computer that you can easily find. We  use the Desktop or My Pictures Open Picasa and let it scan the folder(s) that your photos are in.Find the photo you want to edit by browsing the image folders in the right pane. Use your mouse to select the photo and click "Enter" on your keyboard or right-click the photo and select "View and Edit" from the menu. Or just double click on a picture

You will click through to a screen with your large picture in the right pane of Picasa. It's here you can crop, straighten, lighten/darken your picture. Give the "I'm feeling lucky" button a try. It's a quick and easy way to improve upon a poor picture.

 After your done tinkering with your picture we are ready to export the photo to a folder on your computer.

Click File and then choose Export Picture to Folder. By default in windows Picasa creates a folder called Picasa Exports in your My Pictures folder, it will then create individual folders for every individual image or batch that you export. So if you have trouble finding the image you exported you'll probably find it in My Pictures/Picasa Exports.

 A window will open. Click Browse to select the folder you want to put your new, resized image in.

Choose "Resize to:" under the Image Size Options heading. Either use the slider to choose a preset default image width or simply type in your own width as a number. Generally you want to set the JPEG

Setting image quality to 70-80%. That's about the best combination of image quality and smaller file size. And that's how you optimise an image for the web.

Your web administrator may have told you to use thumbnail photos that are 150 pixels wide. If that is the case, then type 150 into the white box next to "pixels".

For those not familar with pixels we've  created a simple illustration to help you decide upon the size of the picture that best suits your needs.  Remember a pixel is just a tiny square that is a solid color. Every digital photo is made up of thousands or millions of these tiny pixels.

If your picture is portrait rather than landscape then the photo's height will be the highest figure
Note:  the default Picasa slider settings are going to be slightly higher than the actual pixel size that results. Landscape (horizontal) photos do export correctly with the default Picasa pixel sizes.

That's it! Now you can email them or upload them to your website, confident that they are optimised for web delivery. 
In future tutorials we will look at batch exporting.