Re-sizing Photos

If you use Windows, here’s a short tutorial on how to re-size photos for the classified site.

If you own a Mac, you probably don’t need any help with photos.

The site is set up to look great with a square photo format but a standard 4X6 horizontal photo size will work fine. Vertical photos or graphics do better cropped closer to a square shape. The optimal size for making your photos load fast but still look good is 500 pixels wide X 500 px high and around 50K file size in one of the following formats: .jpg .gif or .png

Method 1: (for Windows users with MS Office)

Most Windows computers have Microsoft Office Picture Manager which lets you crop, rotate and re-size the photo for your ad. On a Windows computer, just right click on the image file, select “open with” and then select the Picture Manager. From there you can click “Picture” / “Compress” and choose the ‘web pages’ setting. That gets your file well under 100Kb in size. If you don’t have the program listed, it can be downloaded free – just google “download MS Office Picture Manager”

The Picture Manager will open with your photo displayed:

After clicking “Compress Pictures”, select the button on the right for “Web Pages”. You can check the before and after file size just above the “OK” button. If it is under 100K, click OK, then click “File” / “Save As” and rename the file and choose where you want to save it that’s easy to find.

This is the file you will select when you add pictures to your listing.

DON’T FORGET TO SAVE THE FILE TO A NEW NAME IF YOU WANT TO KEEP THE ORIGINAL SIZED PHOTO.

Method 2: (easy to use, but slower than method 1 if your files are over 1 Mb)
Another way to re-size photos prior to uploading them is to use a free online service like http://www.webresizer.com You simply upload your photo, crop, adjust or rotate,  set the image width to 500px, download the file to your computer and then upload the photo with your ad.