Saturday, November 16, 2013

For Bloggers // Auto-Sizing Photos.

Earlier this week, an amazing new website for bloggers was launched by one of my favorite bloggers, Dana from the Wonder Forest. If you haven't had the opportunity to visit her new website, I Can Build a Blog, you should! It's a fantastic resource for those wanting to learn more about building a blog.


Today, thanks to Dana's new website, I learned a VERY, VERY valuable trick about auto-sizing the photos in my blog posts...! I'm banging my head against the table for not realizing this much earlier in my blogging days because this trick is really quite simple and will make my life a lot easier down the road.

With my current blog layout, the width of my blog posts are approximately 650px. I personally like it when the width of my images align pretty closely to that of my post text. Up until today, when editing my photos in my photo editor, I would save them to have a width of 640px. 

I learned that if I decided to re-design my blog layout and increase the width of my blog posts to 700px, for example, and wanted to increase the size of my images, I would have a lot of work ahead of me. The issue? My images are all saved to a width 640px. To resize them, I would have to go into each individual post, plus they would look stretched because the original size of the image was only 640px.  

Because of this helpful post on I Can Build a Blog website, I am changing how I edit and save my blog post images...!

Going forward, all images that I save to my Web Picasa will have a width of 800px. Also, by ensuring the default size of my images is set to "original" in each blog post (this step is every important), and by adding a few lines of css to my blog's template, the width of every image in every blog post will automatically be set to 640px. If I decide to change that size to 650px in a week's time, all I have to do is edit the css and the width of all images are now 650px.! Easy peasy.

... and that is why I love css! It is infinitely editable, giving you the flexibility of changing the look of your blog (font, font color, background, etc) in mere seconds.

To learn how to properly auto-size your blog's photos, check out I Can Build a Blog website. If you aren't already doing this with your blog's images, I recommend you start, like yesterday!

6 comments:

  1. Replies
    1. You're welcome!! Hope you find Dana's new website as helpful as I do!

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  2. Yes! I recently discovered CSS and it is too awesome!

    Maria xx
    www.cheekypinktulip.blogspot.com

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    1. I have generally always used it for my blog, but never thought of using it for my images. Better now than than never!

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  3. That's a really cool feature! All of my photos are 700px wide because I thought long and hard about what I thought I might do or change as far as web design, and I figured that would be a happy medium no matter what I did in the future. This is a much better option, though, as long as the quality doesn't change.

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    1. That's what I thought too about a year ago, but then I went and changed my layout and found myself having to edit every photo. Huge pain in the butt. As long as the image is getting smaller, the quality will be fine, its just when you enlarge an image that it becomes distorted.

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