Preparing your image for posting to the blog

When you want to post an image to the blog you need to save it at a blog-friendly size and in a blog-friendly format before you insert it into your blog post. Here are the steps for preparing your image from Photoshop:

  1. Open your file in Photoshop
  2. Image>Duplicate. In the ensuing dialog, check the box labeled ‘Duplicate Merged Layers Only’ and click OK. You will be creating a duplicate of your image, with only 1 layer. All the layers in the new file will be flattened together. You are doing this on a DUPLICATE of your image, so that your original file still has all the layers for future editing, but the duplicate is simplified into 1 layer.
  3. Image>Image Size. Check the boxes marked “Constrain Proportions” and “Resample Image”. In the area labeled “Pixel Dimensions”, change the largest dimension to 1200 pixels. If neither dimension is larger than 1200 then you don’t need to change anything. When you change one dimension, the other will change proportionally. That is fine. Click OK. Now you have resized your image.
  4. File>Save for Web & Devices. From the pop-up menu labeled “Preset” choose “JPEG Medium”. Other choices are possible here so if you know what you’re doing, feel free to make another choice. If you don’t know what you’re doing, “JPEG Medium” is a good all-purpose choice. Click Save.
  5. When you save, give your file with a web-friendly file name. Keep the .jpg suffix at the end of the file. Do not use spaces or funny characters in the file name. So, don’t name your file “My cool picture.jpg” or “my!cool#picture.jpg”. But you can safely name it “myCoolPicture.jpg” or “my-cool-picture.jpg”.

Now that you have a resized, reformatted picture file, you are ready to insert it in a blog post. The instructions for creating blog posts, including how to insert an image into a blog post, are in the handout I gave you. You can find a PDF of that handout here.

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4 Responses to Preparing your image for posting to the blog

  1. Danii Oliver says:

    How do we post our header images for the main blog page?

  2. You can either send the image to me directly via email, or put it in a new blog post so I can retrieve it from the blog.

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