Need help prepping images for the web? Here’s your solution.

By: Michael Lipe, creative director, March 24, 2009

Content Management Systems are becoming more and more popular and easy to use for websites. But one of the missing links in the whole process has been our ability to give our clients an easy way to resize their own images.

Well, we have recently discovered a very easy to use tool called Shrink-O-Matic, developed by a company called Toki-Woki. This is a easy-to-use, drag and drop style application that allows anyone with a mouse to take an image that they want to put on the web, and easily resize (and compress) the image to a more manageable size and type. The vast majority of our web clients do not have software on their computer like Photoshop (unless it is something that came with a digital camera) that is capable of doing this small but very important step.

This is a program developed on the Adobe AIR platform, which means it will require you to install the AIR plugin before you are able to install the actual software, but do not let that stop you. AIR is a great development tool that allows web developers to make web-style software that runs like software on your computer (and not on the web per se). But the actual system will look and feel like a web application, so it will be very friendly to use. Programming styles like Ajax and Flash are very commonly used in these applications so they are very slick.

Anytime we install a Content Management System (CMS) on a site for a client we have done the vast majority of the hard work by styling the template that they will use for the individual page layouts. We have made decisions like font size, color, menu layout, etc, but one thing we can’t necessarily do for them is enable them to easily add images to the individual pages - which (by the way) is a very important sep that most clients overlook or keep away from simply becuase they are not interested in the time and effort it takes to understand how to make them work.

The tendency is to upload a large image (perhaps off a digital camera) that might be 8-10 MB in size. And then resize it down to the roughly 300 pixel size that fits on the page. The reality is that even though they have sized the image down, they have not changed the data size of the image, and even though the image may appear small on the page, it is actually loading as the 8 MB image (which on some connections may take a very long time). A great website will work very efficiently, and having properly sized/compressed images is critical for that to be the case. They also add quite a lot to the overall layout of the page, and for that reason alone it is worth the effort.

RELATED LINKS:

Here is more information on ADOBE AIR and on Shrink-O-Matic.

http://www.adobe.com/products/air/

http://toki-woki.net/p/Shrink-O-Matic/