Adding Images – The Reality!
Breakfast Blogging Club June '09
We recently had our 11th meeting of the Breakfast Blogging Club. It was a full house, with 10 participants – and even an unexpected drop in! – made welcome by Beth. Thankfully we were able to squeeze everyone in…barely!
It was a special ‘Tech Clinic’ (our second) with guest presenter, Lee Rodrigues from the Technology Dojo. Lee spoke to us about embedding images – where to find them (stealing, buying, making, & “borrowing”), how to embed them in your blog post, and how to edit them so they’re optimized.
Personally speaking, I was really looking forward to this meeting. There have been times when I’ve spent WAY too much time wrestling with images, trying to make them look ‘perfect’….oh, there’s that ugly word!
I’ve gotten better since Lee’s presentation, as I will describe in a minute. But I can tell there’s more to learn (welcome to blogging!) For example, did you know the appearance of an image is also affected by the theme you use, a fact I had not considered before. I felt I could relax a little, “Oooohhh, it’s not just MEEEEEE! Ooooooohhhhhkaaayyyy….!”
Moving on.
So here’s my experience with the images thaing:
Inserting an image from my computer
A couple of weeks ago I wrote about a blog post check list. When I wrote it, I intentionally left out any images, hoping to practice after our Tech Clinic. So that evening, I dove in and added 2 pictures to the post to get a feel for the process. The first image you’ll see is a check list. Here are the 4 steps I took to do it:
Step 1: I actually wrote out the list myself, and then took a picture of it with my iPhone.
Step 2: Then I emailed it to myself (faster than sync’g)
Step 3: Opened my email and saved the picture to my desktop
Step 4: Then I went back into edit the Post and inserted the picture using the “Add an Image” button
Buhlieve me!…I tried to do a search with Flickr, excited to try out my new knowledge of using the Creative Commons feature. But after spending a lot of time trying to find just the right image, I gave up and decided to make my own. It took about 4 minutes using the 4-Step process I just outlined.
Then I got to feel smart – if only for a little while. I gave the check list image a Title, Caption and Description according to the great information Lee shared with us. The Title is what people see when they hover their mouse over the image. It needs to be descriptive of the picture. Ideally it should use keywords, too. Don’t give it a Title that looks like DSF0009.jpg, or something like that. I gave mine ‘blog post check list’ – all in lower case.
The Caption is what you see right below the image. I gave it the same as the Title, but this time starting each word with caps. I think this is where the Theme you’re using affects how it looks in the post.
Next came the Description, which in my example included keywords associated with blogging and embedding images. You can put whatever is appropriate for your image.
It was pretty simple and straightforward to do.
Finally, I wanted to add a border and spacing around the picture, so everything didn’t get all ‘schmushed’ (technical blogging term). After inserting the picture, (1) I clicked on the image while still in Edit mode. (2) I went back to edit the picture, (3) clicked on Advanced Settings and put the number 2 for the Border, Vertical space, and Horizontal space.
Inserting an image from Flickr
Next I wanted to take up the challenge and use more of the information Lee gave us that day. But here’s where I ran into a little stumbling block. And maybe this has happened to you…
I finally found a cool picture. I was ready to grab the URL and give the photographer credit, but when I went to the Creative Commons portion of her page, it appeared that I didn’t need to.
Then I tried to right-click and save a copy to my computer, but I couldn’t do that either. D’oh! Maybe I’m doing this wrong. I may find out one day. At this point I’m ready to throw in the towel. [ding] Then I get one final idea to get around this vexing problem.
I’ll do a screen capture!
Very primitive, but effective. And to simplify it even more, I bypassed Photoshop. I bypassed PhotoSuite. And I settled on Microsoft Paint. Somebody’s probably rolling their eyes right now. OY!
Here’s the steps I took:
Step 1: from my laptop keyboard I press Function Key + Print Screen
Step 2: Open MS Paint, click Edit and Paste
Step 3: Click Image→Crop
Step 4: Click and drag area I want to keep
Step 5: Cut
Step 6: Go up to File and click on New
Step 7: Go to Edit and Paste
Step 8: Do a ‘Save As’ onto your desktop and voila!
Then I followed the steps for inserting images from my computer…AND I still gave photo credit to Goddess_Spiral whoever she is. (interesting pics, BTW)
For future posts, I’ll still bravely endeavor to look for Creative Commons images on Flickr – just to say I’ve done it – but I gotta tell ya, it ain’t as straight forward as I thought it would be. And Flickr itself does not have the greatest search functionality in my humble opinion. But we keep learning as we go…. Give this a try for yourself. Let us know how it goes.
Blog on!
Cheryl
Comments
One Comment on Adding Images – The Reality!
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admin on
Sun, 5th Jul 2009 5:19 pm
Cheryl, Thanks for bring Lee in. We sure learned a lot!
Thanks for the tutorial!
