How to Capture an Image
by Dave (Felt) Feltenberger

Pictures may be stored on a computer in a number of formats, but the web recognizes only a couple of those formats. The images you see on the web are usually either jpg or gif files. The names are taken from the extension appended to the end of the file name, such as DavesNiceWagons.gif  or DavesNiceHarness.jpg. 

A number of other digital formats for photographs and images can be readily presented on your computer, but are foreign to the World Wide Web. For example, most files sent and received by a fax machine are in .tif format. If you have a picture and the extension on the file name is not .gif or .jpg (or .jpeg), you will need to convert it. Luckily, most computer-based photo processing software is capable of doing this conversion for you. If yours does not, you either need to find a friend with a package that does or you are out of luck as far as posting pictures on the web. 

In most cases, all you need to do is open the image in your photo software and save it in one of the desired formats. Once you have the file displayed in your image processing software, it may generally be converted by clicking the file menu item at the top left hand of your screen and then clicking the “Save As” menu entry.  This will open a dialog box that will give you a choice of formats in which to save the document.  Choose .jpg.

While we are talking about the Save As menu selection, let's talk about how big your image is going to be. As digital cameras get greater fidelity, the pictures they produce require more file space in which to store them. If you store these pictures for display on the web in this high fidelity format, people with dial up (therefore low speed) internet connections may never be able to view them.  Most of these same photo processing software packages offer the opportunity to use the “Save as” option to save smaller images that will display much faster, if a little less clear.  This is usually mechanized by the use of a little slider in the lower left corner of the Save As dialog box.  Just click to the left of the slider before saving the image.

Different packages have different options.  Some have the ability to control the size of the image in pixels. Some have a Save for the Web option.  If you have these, you want to save an image in a size less than 1/2 megabites and no wider than 500 pixels.

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