Optimizing and Resizing Images

You may try to upload photos and find that they are not displayed as you want them.  This is due to the fact that Cafe Q will try to crop them to fit specific formats such as your face pic or a logo for a group. You may also find that the photo from your camera isextremely large both in physical size and file size.  This can lead to malfunctioning during upload or very slow loading when displayed in your gallery. So. if you do not have a photo editing application for cropping and resizing your photos, we have provided links to two good online applications that are free.

Use Picnik.com for Free Online Photo editing.
This application is free, and enables you to resize, crop, adjust color, sharpen and remove red-eye from your photos.  It also enables you to reduce the file size, but is not the best application for doing so. For reducing file size we recommend the application below.

Optimize your photos with Web Resizer.
Optimizing means reducing a photo's file size by compacting the code. Web Resizer is the best online application we have found for reducing the size of images since it gives you a preview of the quality of the picture and it's reduced files size so that you can make the best trade-off between file-size and quality.  Generally, you can reduce your quality to around 20 without significant degradation.

• Go to www.WebResizer.com
• Upload your photo into the browse box at the top. Your photo will appear in the two boxes with the optimized and resized photo on the left.
  
• In the boxes below, make adjustments to the attributes of the photo . You can usually reduce the image quality to 20 or 30 on most images.
• For images to be used for profile, group or event pics, reduce the quality to 20 and the shortest dimension to 175.
• Then download your pics to disk.