I am reading up on image management in preparation for producing a web site with basic genealogy data before the baby comes; Joy & Brian gave me Second Site as part of my birthday present, which produces a nice-looking site from my TMG database. I really want to get this up before May as that’s one of the best ways to get contacted by people researching related lines and often gets you past roadblocks you haven’t been able to overcome on your own (like when I got in touch with the kenefick.com site last week). I’d love it if someone researching Gertrude (my great-grandmother) Ford’s family found me and shared information!
Anyway, I am a well-educated, reasonably intelligent woman who’s not afraid of technical terms, but this is driving me crazy. Learning the difference between rescaling and resampling (and accomplishing it—Word seems to ignore whatever I think I’ve just done, and I can’t tell if it’s b/c I didn’t really do what I think I did or Word is screwed up), dpi vs ppi, getting LZW compression out of my *.tif files, figuring out which size of image (and type—jpg, tif, gif, etc.) is better for a printed report versus a web page versus archiving purposes—aagh! This is not fun.
Posted by elizabeth at February 14, 2004 03:45 PMWord always does funky things to images I paste into it. So now I always edit and scale them in an external application (PhotoShop, FireWorks, PaintshopPro, whatever) so that Word doesn't need to do anything to them. Besides, when in doubt, always blame Microsoft, that's what I do :-)
If you deal with photographs, you never want to use GIF, which is best used for solid color images (line art, logos, etc.) For photos, you want to use JPEG for your web images and TIFF for archival stuff and, more likely than not, for printing.
Posted by: stepan on February 17, 2004 12:06 PMThanks for your comments--I had already decided to blame Microsoft--it's usually the right thing to do. GRRR!
After writing the above entry, I got through the question of what file type to use for which purpose; I was lost in the quagmire of rescaling vs resampling (and how to rescale in Irfanview), what dpi and width to set for the scaled images, how best to set up my directories for archives, TMG images, and SS images . . . I think I now have a workable approach, and luckily I have only 124 exhibits linked into my genealogy database to go back and redo.
Posted by: Moi on February 17, 2004 12:51 PM