A request to photographers posting pix

Baz, i must say i agree with Errol. It is a pain. Fortunately does not happen often but if posters can think about it before they post, it would be great.

Come on all you dinosaurs, get a bigger monitor! ;D

Dave, I think we've asked posters once before to only post images at around 640 x 800 size?

And I don't have a widescreen monitor either, although it is flatscreen.

How do your reduce a photo in Windows Paint? I have never worked that out, I find the program pretty useless and use Photoshop.

As there seems to be some mis-understanding about the issues that wide photos cause, let me have a go at explaining.

With some browsers/operating system combinations (e.g Firefox on Windows7), a wide photo causes all text lines in all posts on the page of the forum currently being displayed to be as wide as the photo.

So on the current 'last 100 posts' page there is at least one photo that is 1024 pixels wide. The text in every message on the page (regardless of which thread it is in) will not wrap to the next line until it has reached the same width as the wide photo. If you make the browser window narrower than than photo, then you have the scroll from side-to-side to read the text on each post (not just the text on the post with the wide photo).

Now I could have my browser window the full width of my 1920px screen, and avoid that particular issue. But there is a reason that large coffee table books (for instance) don't run blocks of text across the entire wide of a page (breaking it up to columns instead) - it is a right pain to read from one line to the next when the page is a foot wide.
So I have the browser window a bit more than half the screen width most of the time. Photos that are 1024 wide fit within the window, the text fits in the window, no sidewards scrolling needed, you can read paragraphs of text easily.

Note that smartphones and tablets that I have used have handled this situation more elegantly. Other browsers and operating systems may also be better at this aspect of things. And me making use of the 'last 100 posts' feature probably maximises the problem. Occasionally a deal with a one-off image on the forum by having my ad-blocker block the image.

Therefore, please limit the size of photos something like 1024 pixels (which is a default size available in nearly all software dealing with photos.)
I'm happy to give people pointers on sharing and tweaking photos, I use Flickr myself.

Thanks :-)
ErrolC (not errolmartyn, with whom I seem to be in violent agreement with)

"Stretch/Screw"? Does one have to pay for that or is it standard?

Stretch/screw is standard on Paint.

I use a later version of Photoshop Elements.
On mine go to the 'Image' menu, then 'Resize' -> 'Image Size'.
Hopefully you will now have a dialog box, which has more things to fiddle with than you can make sense of :-)
First check that Width and Height will change together. In mine this means making sure that 'Constrain Proportions' is ticked.
Second check that you are setting the Width (and Height) as pixels, rather than as a percent of the original, this should be indicated, change if needed.
Then just type the Width you want in the 'Width' box, e.g. 1024
Then 'Save As' the file so you don't over-write your original.


The other approach is the load the full-size photo to Photobucket, and get Photobucket to give the forum a smaller version. I believe this is fairly straightforward, I'll let someone who uses it explain.


I shamelessly used the Jag for early access, then ran for the fence :-)

There is another feature in MS Office Picture Manager and that is the Export function.

Once the size is re-set, top right Edit menu and select EXPORT , then you can alter the name of the changed size image with ??????Sml.jpg on the end or something so you end up with two files of the same image with the same base filename.

Graeme