Communities of practice online: Reflection through experience and experiment with the Webheads community of language learners and practitioners
Week 1
2.
PHOTOS ONLINE
Hi
everyone,
I thought you might appreciate this
situation:
I
thought I had discovered the most efficient way to post
photos online with the minimum amount of html
coding.
However, halfway through the process I
discovered
a much more efficient (and easier) method. I haven't yet gotten around to
posting via the second method but
if you'd like to see the first effort,
visit:
http://www.eslhome.com/pics/cps/index.htm
All the best,
Arlyn
PS: Anyone viewing this on a dialup
connection, I'd appreciate feedback about the
length of time taken for photos
to load, etc. (I'm currently on a cable modem).
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Nice photos ;-)
'mind telling us what the method is (the better
one)?
Aiden
::::::::::::::::
Very
nice pictures! Congratulations. It did not take very long to load only
about
three seconds.
Emma
:::::::::::::::::::
Arlyn,
- I'm on 53.2 kbps at the moment and the page took about a minute – quite
acceptable I'd say for a page with so many images.
- Michael C.
::::::::::::::::::::::
Nice and fast-loading photos, Arlyn,
but am interested in knowing the two
processes
- old and new! This one works great on a cable connection.
Happy New Year!
Teresa
::::::::::::::::::::.
Hi
everyone,
Yes, it's a very good question
everyone has asked: what are the two methods and
the differences between the two.
Method one
(more work and three times the file
creation)
involved:
1. creating a main .jpg at full size
2. a smaller .jpg of same image ('thumbnail'-
about 20% of orig. size) saved with a
different file name (I added "th_"
to the front of each file name). I saved
the
thumbnails "for the web" so they would load
quickly.
3. creating a main index page (.htm)
for all the thumbnails.
4. creating a separate .htm page for
EACH full size .jpg
5. the thumbnails are really links to
the larger size photo.
The easier method,
discovered late in the game, is the
following:
1. create one image file, at full
display size
2. create a second smaller image for
thumbnail
3. create one main index page to
display thumbnails
4. use the following html code (rows
inside a table):
<td ALIGN=CENTER VALIGN=BOTTOM>
<font face="your choice here"
size="-2">
<a HREF="image_name.jpg"
target="ImageWindow">
<img SRC="thumbnail_image_name.jpg"
WIDTH="80"
HEIGHT="80" BORDER="0"
ALT="image_name.jpg">
<br>your caption here</a></font></td>
Basically using this option removes
the need for an individual .htm page for
displaying the full size image. When the thumbnail is
clicked, an "image window" opens, displaying
the full-sized image. I was not
aware of this "image window" command as a
target
for the image when I began this project. This
option
reduces the labor and amount of file creation
by one-third.
NOTE:
I haven't actually tried this second method
yet,
I discovered it on someone else's page, and chose
"view
source" to see the html. The drawback is that
the
image window option doesn't allow for further
captions
or color choice (white seems to be the
default).
Did anyone by any chance happen to
click to see the full-size photos on my page?
Since these are saved at higher quality and are larger
files, I was concerned about THEIR download time.
Let me know if any of you try version
two and how it works out for you.
All the best,
Arlyn
:::::::::::::::::::
Hi,
and, another
option;
Download
Express Thumbnail Creator from http://www.express-soft.com/
The
program is pretty reliable and flexible. They offer a trial version with
which you can try it for 30 days. I liked the program in the way that it really
is worth paying. If you are creating bunch of pictures and want it to
be presented in an orderly fashion, I highly recommend it.
arif
::::::::::
Dear Arlyn,
I have printed your instructions for uploading a photo and I
am as happy as a dog with two tails because I learned how to manipulate
photoes thanks to your tips. I have just uploaded my photo,
have a look :) I would like to make it clearer. Can somebody
help?
Nelba
::::::::::::::::
Dear
Nelba,
Getting the resolution you want varies
according to many variables.
1) Were you beginning with a digital
image, or a photo still
that was scanned? If
digital, the image resolution can be made to appear
sharper
by using the "sharpen" filter in Adobe
Photoshop (very expensive software,
but they do allow for a free 30-day trial
download). If scanned, then you can select to scan the
image at a higher resolution (slower scan and
larger file).
2) Did you reduce the photo and then
try to enlarge it from the reduced size? In
looking at the image, it appears to be highly pixelated,
which occurs when the above steps are taken.
When this happens, go back to the
original (high resolution) version of the
image and choose to reduce the size by
a different percentage. I have done this
several
times (using the "undo" function) until the
image
appears at the correct size. Basically, you can
only
go in one direction (from larger to smaller) and
NOT 'from larger to smaller to
larger'.
3) Another variable is choosing to
save a smaller file size, which means to also save
at a poorer resolution. The ideal
situation is to find the exact point where the
file can be reduced without losing too much
resolution.
In Adobe Photoshop, there is the
option to "Save for the Web": choose the
"4-up" tab and you will see four
versions
of the image, at varying files sizes and
resolutions.
The upper-left image will be the image
at
its full size and resolution. The upper-right will
offer
a drastically smaller file (with a quicker
upload time) and with some loss
of resolution. This
is the option I chose for my "thumbnail"
images. However,
for the full-size images, I chose to keep the
highest resolution. Sometimes,
to reduce the file size, I cropped the images to
be physically smaller. This created a smaller file without lowering the
resolution.
Having looked at the photo, I would
suggest going back to the highest resolution
version of the image, practicing reducing by various
percentages (and choosing
"undo") until you find the percentage that
makes
you happy.
Ugh! This is definitely one of those
processes that is much easier to demonstrate
than to explain! Hope this helps (I love the idiom
about a dog with two tails!) to keep you 'wagging'.
All the best,
Arlyn
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Hi
everyone,
Well, on another web surf I discovered
a beautiful display of photos with a link
to the source script. And
it's free! Follow
this link: http://photoframe.sourceforge.net/
The description for the Php source
script reads
partially
as follows:
"This free and simple PHP4 script
aims to make it as easy as possible to display a
bunch of photos on the web with thumbnails, captions
and comments. All you need to do is drop your
JPEG, PNG and GIF files in a web server directory,
drop this script in with them (named index.php) and
it's done. The script takes care
of:
*
making thumbnails,
* writing the pages,
* adding captions
* adding Next/Previous links
* adding an Auto slideshow mode, with
a user-set timer"
It looks real good to me :) !
All the best,
Arlyn
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sounds really great Arlyn...
I cannot wait to test it this weekend.
altunA
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Dear WH's,
I thought I'd share with you(all) a
page that a friend created using just the
built in functionality of PhotoShop7 (an expensive program I realize).
This version of PhotoShop seems to be able to automatically create pages very
similar to the ones Arlyn showed us -- all you have to do is
point it to a directory/folder.
http://homepage.mac.com/fundy/newyears2003/
Of course, Dougimas' software is FREE
and has the very nice feature of including a guest comment section.
--Don
PS. I'm also interested in trying out
Dougimas' highly interesting Moodle courseware
but again the installation looks a little daunting for someone with
no net administration experience. Has anyone tried this out?
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I found the info Arlyn shared with us about mastering this process
VERY
daunting
Don and abandoned the idea so you're not alone!
>BTW, it appears that you can do
something very similar in Photoshop, i.e. automatically
create a webpage that displays photos. Photoshop
does allow you to 'record' a series of steps that you use on an image
so you can ask it to replicate that same process over and over, but don't
ask me how to do it! It's one of those things I was intending to get back
to. Any Photoshop experts out there? I bet if you went sniffing around the users
help section at http://www.adobe.com/support/forums/main.html
you'd find the answer or someone who
could help you with the answer.
And Adobe seem to have a new product
called Photoshop Album for $50 which creates pages and albums of pix.
- Michael C.
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I
too didn't like all the fussiness of the PHP
site--couldn't figure out what I
really needed and what was just icing-on-cake. So
I've been working on various (free) options for
installing photos, thumbnails, etc., and found
some good scripts at http://www.htmlgoodies.com/
(I
think I may have gotten this address from Vance or
another
WebHead originally!)
If you can make a basic Webpage with
html, you can insert photos, resizing them to
be thumbnails and making them into "buttons"
that will pop you to a linked
Webpage with the original big photos.
If you want some scripts to copy, let
me know.
Also,
if you save an MSWord doc with photos as a
Webpage,
the photos will be there, though a little
fuzzy.
It's good for rough and ready, though the photo
quality
is pitiful, and of course you won't have
thumbnails.
As other Webheads have reported, the "Save
as
Webpage" in MSWord is not good and often takes more
time
to clean up than it's worth--better to start with
your
own html page from scratch.
BTW, I found in geocities that I was
not allowed to upload html files, but could
use their create-a-file option and paste in the html
from a Webpage created in Simple text
or Netscape Composer, or even MSWord.
--Elizabeth
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...and the consumer shall lead us...
Found this site that uses a unique combo of family home pics and embeded
Real Audio. Reality is, as the common user becomes more saavy, expectations of professional usage is
bound to rise. In other words, if this family can do it, then we ought to know how-to too.
http://family.heyum.net/real.html
-- click on "Audio
Picture 4" for a cute one.
regards,
Arlyn