Any picture that is already on the internet can be used on your website – this is normally easier than uploading a picture yourself to the myCouncillor system.
Any picture, that is, that you have permission to use!
This might be:
•?A photo from a free photo website (try typing in “free photos” into google and you’ll find loads of websites that have useful free photos
• A photo from somebody else that you have permission to use, or they’re OK with you using the image as long as you credit them
• A photo you have put onto a photo-sharing site yourself – like Flickr or Picasa (see next chapters).
First we need to get ready to use a picture on mycouncillor.
Click on the little “tree” when you’re writing a story on the website. This will open a “insert/edit image” box where you can add a photo to your site.
1 Get the Web Address of the Picture (URL)
Every photo on the internet has its own internet address or URL.
To find out the address of any photo you need to “right click” (that is when you’re mouse pointer is on the photo, press the right hand button of the mouse).
Then select “properties” (this time with the left hand button of the mouse!).
Copy the image address to use on your website and PASTE it into the URL?box in the Insert/Edit Image box on mycouncillor.
(right click copy, right click paste)
2 Add a description (optional)
You could add a description to the photo – this will appear when people move their mouse pointer over the photo.
3 Specify the Alignment (optional)
If your photo is smaller than the page (for mycouncillor less than 500 pixels) you might want text to appear to the right (or left) of the picture. For text to appear on the right, choose “Left”. If you leave this blank i’ts fine.
4 Specify the Size
This is important. Your photo should not be more than 500 pixels wide. If its bigger than 500 you will want to reduce the size of the photo. You might perfer a much smaller photo on your site. Remember to avoid “stretching” – this is where you reduce the hight more than the width – so people start looking strangely fat, short or thin!
5 Border (optional)
You might want to add a black line around your photo to give it extra definition. Choose “1” for a thin black line – leave blank if you don’t want a line.
6 Vertical and Horizontal Space (optional)
You might want to have some blank space around your photo. Especially if you have chosen to have text to the right of your photo it will look messy with no space around the photo.
On the first page of a Flickr gallery, the picutres are relatively small.
You might want to use one of these smaller pictures to illustrate an article on your website, without dominating the page!
Using Flickr
Flickr, www.flickr.com is an online photo sharing website, probably the most popular in the world and used by many professional photographers.
Its FREE to set up a simple account – but if you want to store a large number of photos, or have lots of different galleries you will have to pay a small fee.
Register for an account at www.flickr.com.
What’s good about Flickr for our purposes, is that it stores the photos “online” for us so they are already there for us to use on our website. It also resizes the photos automatically for us, so we don’t have large files clogging up our website.
Even better, there is already a photo archive created on Flickr which Lib Dem’s can use!
www.flickr.com/photos/libdems has a growing collection of useful national picutres, including many of our Leader Nick Clegg MP.
If you click on one of the smaller pictures in flickr – a bigger picture is revealed. This picture is 5oo pixels wide – the maximum size for your website.
Using a larger picture like this will have great visual impact on your website.
Flickr contains an easy way to find out the website address of the photo – and choose different sizes.
Just about the bigger version of the picture clock on “all sizes”
Once you’ve chosen your image size – towards the bottom of the screen you will find the “image address”.
Copy this image address (right click – copy)
Pase the address into the address box in your mycouncillor site “add image” tool.
Using Picasa
Picasa is another online photo programme – this time from Google.
Picasa is free, and all you need is a google account.
Sign up for Picassa at www.picaasaweb.google.com
Picasa is more commony used for people who just want to share their family photos “online”. Its a very simple tool if you just want to use it as a way of getting pictures to your website.
You can download (for free) some simple software for your PC which will help you organise your photos, and publish them to your picasa online gallery.
Alternatively, if you don’t want Picasa to organise the photos on your computer, you can use use the simple “upload” feature on Picasa which means you can just upload the pictures you want.
To use one of the photos in your Picasa album, click on the photo.
You need to find out the picture’s URL (right click properties – see above) and then paste this into your “create/edit image” box.
Unlike Flickr, Picasa doesn’t resize your images for you – so you will ned to make sure that your picture is not more than 500 pixels wide
Updates and comment
Last updated by Tim Pickstone 5 August 2009.
If you have any suggestions on how this post could be improved or you want to send us any relevant examples or artwork, or if you find any errors, please email ALDC by clicking here.