Chat Room: Picture Perfect

I've always advocated including digital photographs of real people doing real things on library Web sites. If you do, it's much more likely that site visitors will respond emotionally to what they see happening. They just might want to be a part of your next Lemony Snicket program, or join you for summer reading.

Getting great photos on your site isn't difficult; it requires three essential steps:

1.) Find someone who is handy with a camera to capture every photogenic event that the library touches—everything from a public library's booth at the county fair to the famous author's visit to a school library.

2.) Purchase the best digital camera you can afford. Most moderately priced ($300 to $600) digital cameras with at least a 2x optical zoom lens should serve the average library just fine. While Sony's Mavica series has been a favorite of librarians—it easily saves its photos on a floppy disk—these cameras are rapidly being replaced by those with memory cards, such as those made by Nikon and Epson. Digital cameras with memory cards (which can store hundreds of photos) are more compact and efficient than the old Mavicas: when it's time to view the photos, simply pop out the memory card and plug it into a reader unit ($15 to $25 if it doesn't come with your camera) that is hooked to your computer.

3.) Use good photo-manipulation software. A typical digital image is between one and two megabytes in size—way too large, both in inches and in kilobytes, for a Web page. Web photos should be no larger than 50K; otherwise a visitor with a dial-up connection will have to wait a long time for the image to load. And no matter how good a digital camera you have, sometimes pictures will come out too dark or faded. To make your Web pictures small enough to load quickly and to adjust the image's color, brightness, and contrast, you'll need graphics software. Most digital cameras come with some kind of photo-manipulation program, but if you can spring for $50 from your technology budget, I recommend purchasing Adobe Photoshop Elements: it's easy to use and gives reliable results (for more information, visit www.adobe.com/education).

Adobe Photoshop Elements has a "crop" tool that lets users draw a rectangle around the most interesting or appealing part of a photo, and hit "Enter" to remove the rest. Most photo-manipulation programs include an image-enhancement command (in the case of Photoshop Elements, it's called "Auto Levels") that makes pictures fresher and livelier. But remember to keep a copy of the original image, just in case you don't like the changes you've made. An "Image Size" command allows users to shrink a picture from, say, 14 x 22 inches to 3 x 4 inches. Photoshop Elements also has a "Save for Web" command that lets users save pictures in the smallest number of kilobytes, while still keeping the image sharp and crisp. When saving photos for a Web page, the software usually lets you save them in GIF or JPG format. JPG, developed specifically for photographs, almost always saves photos smaller than GIF does.

These operations might sound complex at first, but once you've mastered them, you'll average fewer than three minutes for tweaking each image. Once you've edited the images to your satisfaction, load them on your home page so everyone can see how much learning, exploration, and, yes, fun are going on at your library.