Blog Images Professionally

Now to re-size images & add watermarks to images is kind of a tedious task, many of us use professional image editors to achieve the same. I consider Paint.Net to be professional too as well when compared to the solution I am talking about. A few clicks, no need to open resource hogging softwares, yet easily re-size, add watermarks, save bandwidth, save online hosting space and still get the same thing done.

Purpose of this tutorial:

1. Easily define & re-size images.
2. Easily add Watermarks to images.
3. Upload images.
4. Save your website bandwidth & storage space.

The following tools will help us re-size, watermark & upload our images by right-clicking only!

First and foremost, I would recommend you to sign up for an account on Image Shack, Sign up.

Next download these software & install it:

We all use images in our blog posts, we also use themes and custom styles on our blogs. A lot of times, images need to re-sized to be posted on the blog so that the blog theme does not break. Then there is the plagiarism issue, people copying our stuff, changing a few lines and putting it up as theirs, happens quite often.

VSO Image Re-sizer is a boon for users, even average users who don’t blog but need to re-size their images can do it without any hassles. Once you have installed VSO Image Re-sizer, you will get a option of the same name when ever you right click on any image, something like this:

When you click on the option you will be greeted with a screen that looks like this & the options are actually quite self explanatory. Screen shot:

You can choose the size of the image from the pre-defined list under profiles or you can define any 1 parameter (height or width) according to your blog style and select the Keep Aspect Ratio option and it will re-size the image accordingly.

The option for format & quality can be used as required.

The next super thing about the software is the ability to add watermarks. Check the ‘Integrate Watermark’ option, then click on the button that reads ‘Watermark…’ to get a window which looks like this:

So if you see you have the option of placing the watermark where you want, you have the option of defining the transparency, which also means that you don’t need to open photoshop to make a transparent image in the first place. Pretty neat, eh?

Now that we have re-sized and watermarked our images let us upload them to imageshack.us. The benefit is that it will not eat your website’s bandwidth at the same time save you hosting space!

Download & install this nifty tool from ImageShack:

This tool will add a ‘Imageshack Quickload’ option in your right click menu same as the ‘VSO Image Re-sizer’ option. Please note that you will need to download Microsoft .NET Framework 1.1 for this application to run, though there are new versions of the .NET framework, you will have to have ver 1.1. Screen shot:

If you see there is an option which shows ‘Logout’. Now once you install the application you will need to login to your account, for doing that you need to have an account, the Sign up page link was given at the top. Anyways right click and hit upload the image will be uploaded to your ImageShack account & then the page will open in the browser that will give you the corresponding links.

Incase you need to upload multiple images like I had to for this tutorila then you will need to navigate to ImageShack.us and choose the ‘Multi Uploader’ option. Screen shot:

Choose the images and hit Upload, it will do the needful. Once done if using IE 7, it will show a page that lists all the images that you chose to upload now with their links. If you use Firefox I was taken to my ImageShack page showing all my images uploaded till now. To get the image properties from there you will need to click on the ‘i‘ next to the image thumbnail to get a window like this. Screen shot:

Copy the code and paste it in you blog post, forums, show thumbnails with links to full view.

Another reason why I suggest you use ImageShack is because it has an online Image Re-sizer too, once you upload the image via the browser you can re-size the image using the online tool & re-upload the image, helpful when you are blogging away from you PC.

Happy Blogging :D