Escaping Minutiae Makes Web Surfing Easier

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Models That Move

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Static Models

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Escaping Everyday Minutiae

of Accessing Modeling Forums

Do you Attach, Upload or Imbed?

Even scale modelers can get bogged down in minutiae and in a lot of cases, miss the forest for the trees.

For instance, many of us are active participants in Yahoo Groups where we share information on the techniques involved in modeling. Photos can enhance this by a thousand per cent (one photo is worth a 1,000 words) and here is where the small stuff comes in: to attach or to embed?

Either technique will work fine for sending photos in emails. The important element in photo care is to resize it to less than 1000 pixels in width (the height will take care of itself). This will take advantage of the screen size offered by most email clients.

I prefer to embed the picture(s) in the email as the photo is right there without involving activation of a graphics program to view them. I do usually reduce the file size to keep it within decency bounds.

Two things affect the load time of your photos, the actual cropped photo size (measured in pixels) and the photo’s compressed file size, The amount of memory it uses (measured in kilobytes).

I use a graphic arts program, Corel Paint Shop Pro to manipulate images. There are also several free tools for this purpose like Irfanview, Easy Resize, Resizer or Shrinkpic.

Manipulating image size is a simple, three step process:

Step 1. Save the photo to a location where you can find it.
Step 2. Open in your graphics program and use the cropping tool to resize, Under 1000 pixels for email, under 500 pixels for web page, and save as a .jpg
Step 3. Open the program you use for compressing photos and reduce file size to under 100k. I save the result with an extension .jpg-o for optimized.

Using this process with your photos will make sharing your work much more gratifying.