Photo and Social Networking Sites: Are You Ready? (Part I)

The web has spawned an amazing variety of photo-related sites. Nearly all of them are free to use, with fees for deluxe features or a larger number of photos. Their purposes range from high-end professionals to beginners, from social networking to photo sharing, from selling your photos to bookmarking what you like. What's more, many of these sites blend such features to cook up their own recipe.

You can be a happy fanatic and spend days learning all about your options, or simply get going on one of the more popular sites, where you're pretty much guaranteed to have a good experience with plenty of features to keep you busy.

But what does it take besides getting pictures onto your hard drive? Wait! Some sites even let you upload pictures right from your cell phone! So let me rephrase that. What does it take to get your pictures into shape for photo sites?

Once you pick the photo sharing site that suits your needs, you'll want to know what limits there are on bandwidth. (Bandwidth means the amount of data you can transfer onto the site.) Is there a monthly limit as to how many gigabytes of data you can upload (transfer)? Is there a maximum total amount? How much does it cost to upgrade to a higher limit? Of course, that only matters if you'll want to share a large number of photos.

If you are concerned about the limits, there are some things you can do to stay under that radar and avoid upgrading, if you wish. Your best option is to upload only the photos that are really worth sharing, either because of their personal significance, or because of their artistic merit. Of course, that depends on why you're there. If you're selective, you'll be uploading fewer photos, and getting more out of what you do share.

Many photo sharing sites do not have size limits on photos, because the sites are intended to share high resolution photos. However, if you don't need the highest resolution, resizing the photo is a good idea. If your camera was set to high resolution, but you just want to share an ordinary photo, you can use a program such as Bulk Photo Resizer to do the job quite easily. In fact, if you have many photos with the same requirements, you can have Bulk Photo Resizer perform the same operation on all of them at once. This is a super time saver. For a typical family photo that doesn't need artistic high resolution, you can please your visitors with a size from 400 to 600 pixels per inch on the longest side (height or width). It just so happens that Bulk Photo Resizer has presets in these sizes, and others, so you don't even have to manually input your desired dimensions. It will even keep everything in proportion for you. This is called maintaining the “aspect ratio.”

Whatever you do, don't enlarge the photo. Bulk Photo Resizer will stop you from doing this. Enlarging will not increase your resolution, it will just make the imperfections larger and more jagged. The larger it is, the more you'll see jagged edges, that we call the “jaggies.” These are from the actual square pixels that make up the image. Once those squares get too big they become pretty obvious throughout the image, not just on the edges. Things they start looking like the effect you see used on TV to obscure someone's face or license plate. That is called pixelation.