A Life Without Compunction

I thought I’d get away from the legal vein and talk a bit about photos. Photos (and video – which I will cover in a different BS article) make a blog lively. They add color, character, spice and visual gossip. Photos can be a great way to convey expressions, feelings and emotions. They can also be a great way to get your friend angry because you posted that photo of them where they look like Jimmy Durante.

Outside of any legal ramifications (which I already covered in the BS III), there are a few topics to consider when posting photos to your website. Once again I will add that this is only my opinion and I’m interested in hearing other opinions and views on this topic.

Permission

When it comes to posting a photo probably the best rule of thumb is making sure that those featured in the photo are okay with having images of them plastered on the world wide web. With friends this is often just a simple understanding. However when you catch someone in your lens who you may not have a “simple understanding” type relationship with you may want to check with them first. Or at the very least remove the photo immediately when requested to do so.

Outside of common courtesy there’s a few considerations:

• You would want them to do the same for you right? (Matthew 7:12)
• Did the person pose for the picture? Or did you catch them in the worst kama sutra position possible?
• Is the picture going to complement your blog or draw ire from your readers.

Children and the WWW

I covered this in a previous post, but it’s worth a mention here. Children are precious and there’s a lot of low life that lurks around the web. Make sure that the parents of the children you post pictures of are okay with you doing so.

Photo Size

Now this is slightly more technical but is a personal pet peeve of mine.

Have you ever visited a website and it took ages for the site to load the pictures? When the site was loaded each picture looked pretty small and grainy and you thought the site owner was nuts for posting such a crummy photo? Often what folks do when putting photos in an article is just upload their nice big 8 megapixel file (2 MB) and then resize the picture using the image tag settings. What you get is a 3264 x 2448 photo displaying at @ 500 x 300. Same download time as the massive version just looking ugly and small.

There’s a few workarounds for this:

• Shrink your photos before uploading. Anything over 1280px (on the long side) is overkill as those visiting your website are probably not planning on making prints. (Hint: Use Shrink Pic)
• If you do have to upload a large image. Make a thumbnail of the image and link to the large version.

Use a Gallery

If you are going to be posting a lot of photos on your website you may consider using a gallery of some sort so that your readers can easily browse through the photos. Having all the photos in a single article makes the frontpage (home page) of your website sluggish and bulky. A couple good examples of websites that utilize gallery software correctly are Steve and Linda / Mike and Nina. (I know there’s others of you but they gave me .10 cents for the back link — so there).

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Photos is something that can be a blessing or a curse to website. Anything that’s visual is bound to catch attention and if you have a blog you probably are looking for some attention. Just make sure that you are attracting the right folks and secondly that you keep your readers happy by not stepping on too many toes.