+Team Lawrence Posted June 13, 2003 Share Posted June 13, 2003 I apologize if a better version of this guide is already available -- I searched the forums and couldn't find it myself. After making quite a few mistakes, I learned a few tips that might be helpful to Apple enthusiasts. Your first issue is that the picture itself needs to be less than 100kb in size. All digital cameras will create images that are significantly larger than this. For instance, one of my cameras takes pictures that are between 1 and 2 meg in compressed JPG format and the older one takes pictures between 600kb and 1.3mb. I'm not going into the issues of tradeoffs in quality between rescaling the images and using higher compression ratios. If you know about that, you probably have image editing software and can handle the resizing fine without my help. For those of you who only use the free stuff that came with your mac, you need to pull the picture up in iPhoto. Select the picture you want to use and check out the data in the lower left hand corner. It should list the resolution of the photo (2048x1536 in my case) and the size (948k in my case). Select File Export from the menu, select JPG from the Format list, select scale and type a new number in the first box. You will have to experiment a bit to figure out the right resolution for you to get down to 100kb. In my case 640, 512 or 320 results in a file that is less than 100kb depending on how big the original image was. When I use the old camera I can almost always get it to fit with 640 or 512. Also, make sure that you select "Use Extension." Although the mac knows it is a picture without the name ending .jpg, the website does not. If you upload an image the doesn't have the .jpg it won't work properly. This took me some time to figure out. I have been able to upload files just fine with Netscape, Internet Explorer and Safari. Other tips include making sure that you have the image correctly rotated in iPhoto or it will display sideways on geocaching.com. I suggest you export three images in a range of resolutions, then look at the files in finder (either hit Apple-I to bring up file size or use the details view) and figure out what picture comes closest to the 100kb limit. Other people have reported that if the files come very close to 100kb mark, the site won't accept it, but I haven't had that happen to me yet and I used one that was 99kb, so you might not see that. If you are more adventurous, a nice completely free tool I have used is Image Edit. If you are willing to pay then I suggest you use the Adobe Photoshop Elements program. It is less than $100 and does an amazing percentage of what the full-fledged Photoshop does. I hope someone finds this useful. My dream is that someone eventually gets Markwelled to this post. Then I'll feel like a real geocacher. Link to comment
+unclerojelio Posted June 13, 2003 Share Posted June 13, 2003 My personal favorite mac graphics package is GraphicConverter. It excels at batch conversions as well as image tweaking. ... Two roads diverged in a wood, and I-- I took the one less traveled by, ... unclerojelio Link to comment
Recommended Posts