As cameras get more impressive, the physical size of photos gets larger and larger.

And when we upload them to the web, they take longer and longer to load on the page. And use up precious bandwidth.

So most sites that accept image uploads, often ask you to keep picture size down, in width, height and filesize.

The reasons to restrict width and height, are so that it doesn’t mess up the layout of the website.
Width and height are typically measured in pixels, for example 400px by 300px.

The reason to restrict filesize is to improve speed of page loading, and to restrict bandwidth.
When we build websites, we try to keep images below 35kb (kilobytes).

And most of us have bandwidth allocations from our ISPs, which can get used up quickly on graphics-intensive websites.

Two excellent free tools for resizing the height, width and filesize of your images are:
ShrinkPictures.com
Resizr

In both cases you can simply visit the site, upload your photo, specify the size or dimensions, and it will resize it for you.

If you want to work offline, you can use the common Microsoft Paint program that comes with your PC, under Accessories.  To resize, select Image from the top menu, then Resize/Skew. Enter say 80% and 80% in the horizontal and vertical boxes, and it will shrink your picture accordingly. I also use Paint for taking screenshots.  Hit the Print Screen button on your PC, to take a copy of your current screen, then Paste it into Microsoft Paint. Use the dotted-line-box to select the part of your picture you want to save, and select Crop, to get rid of the rest. Resize if necessary, and save as JPG.

For advanced resizing,  cropping, sharpening, balancing and retouching, I use Adobe Photoshop. But GIMP is a popular free open source alternative.

Have fun

This was one of the first things I hesitated with, starting out online.

There are two occasions these days where I have to create a text file, with no suffix, or a non-standard suffix:
i. Creating a .htaccess file for PHP applications
ii. Editing a host entry file, for DNS masking.

I can’t remember the first time I had to do this, but it did make me pause.

1. Open Notepad and create your content.
2. Select File, then Save As (instead of just save)
3. By default, Windows selects “Save as Type: ” to be “Text Document”.
However this is a pull-down list, so select “All files (*.*) instead of Text Document.
This will allow you to specify the exact filename that you want, instead of a file that looks like filename.txt.

If this still doesn’t work, check your firewalls and anti-virus programs. If you are writing to a system file, they may block the file saving, and give you a strange error message. Or say that they save it, but not really do it.

And if you are still having problems editing a file that doesn’t have a suffix, open Notepad by itself. Then drag the file you want to edit, into Notepad. Then use the process above, (File, Save As, All Files(*.*) to save the file. Apparently dragging a file into Notepad is the best way of ensuring that it doesn’t get changed into a .txt file.

Hope that helps.