When adding photos to a page we're all tempted to take the shortest path to that goal. But to make your site as friendly to your visitors as possible you should create web-page friendly images. It's really very easy. While ZooLoo will probably provide tools to resize images, it's still easier to do it on your own computer. It's faster, and it doesn't rely on your internet being up.
There is a magical image management tool by Google called "Picasa". It will allow you to easily edit your images. For the purposes of this tutorial we're more concerned with resizing images to make them page friendly. The dirty little secret about photos is that they are huge. It's hard to express how large in layman's terms. I can go into megabytes, and cable connections versus DSL or dialup.
In order to simplify the understanding of what "huge" means, look at it this way: if you pull full size photos into your page, it will take 2 times longer to load for each image you put in the page. So if a page with no images takes 3 seconds to load, one image will make that 6 seconds. Two images makes it 12 seconds. Three images makes it 24 seconds. I know 24 seconds doesn't seem that long. But to someone on a very bad connection that could be a minute of waiting.
The problem is we want to print our pictures, so the camera takes very, very large images so that they transfer to paper in a much higher quality. In most cases, even with a very large monitor, a picture from a camera can't even be shown full-size. Windows, or Mac automatically fits it into your window. While that adds convenience, it's deceptive.
You can perform the same trick in a web page. You can make a very large image appear to be much smaller. But, it's only an illusion. The image is still very large. The browser (Firefox, Safari, or Internet Explorer) can make it smaller for you -- but only visually. It still has to download the full-sized image.
There is a better way to add images to your page. It requires a little more prep time, but not really that much. In fact, the 5 to 10 minutes of learning to resize images will save you much more in viewing your page over time. Not only that, but everyone else benefits.
The way I accomplish this is to create a new folder on my computer in my "My Pictures" folder. I call it "Web Images". That's where all my images that are meant for web pages go. These images are much smaller and fit nicely with text. Picasa makes resizing really easy. Furthermore, it has a lot more features than just resizing. I'm not going to give a full tutorial on Picasa here -- Google has a great walk-through at the Picasa site (click the image above to go there).
You don't need to know anything about image sizes other than some simple "good numbers" to remember.
Install Picasa. It will then scan your computer for all of your photos. After it finishes (it can take a few minutes, depending on how many photos you have) select 5 images that you like. Then go to Picasa's "File" menu, and select "Export". A window will pop-up that looks like the following:
You can see where I created my photo folder in the "Location of exported folder" box. I name the exported folder with some indication of what I'm using this set of exported images for. The next thing you'll see are the options to use the original size, or to resize to some other size.
Select "Resize to". Now for those magic numbers to remember. Which number you choose depends on how you intend on using the image.
Some images (like the Picasa Image above) don't need to be very large. Since I grabbed that image from somewhere else, it's 150. Which is right between 120 and 200. So I kept its original size. If you plan on having photos embedded within text (like this article) You should try to use 120 or 200.
What do you do with that number? Type it into the "pixels" box. Then click "OK". Your resized images will be placed into the specified folder, and they will be a much more sane size for web-site use.
The next step, of course, is to get them into your ZooLoo photo manager. Since there are no limits as to how many albums you can create, go ahead and create a new one just for these new pictures. I call my album "Site Images" so that I know which ones have been resized specifically for web-page use.
And now, when you go to edit your page with photos, you can just select that album, and drag and drop those images into your article.