Squidoo Photo Gallery Module: A Step-By-Step Tutorial

Squidoo guru Dagsmith has a ton of great lenses on editing photos and images. One of his lenses covers his recommendations for the Best Tools for Resizing Photos.

Let me take you step by step through one of them, Web Resizer.

1. Go to webresizer.com and click the orange "Resize Photos Now" button.
   
   To start with, there will be a default photo of a giraffe. This is just a placeholder:
   
   


2. Click "Choose File" and select an image from your hard drive.
   
   
3. Click "upload image."
   
   
   
   At right is the orignal photo, but the view is shrunk so it fits on the window. At left is your RESIZED photo. By default, it's shrunk to 400x300, which is actually a good size.
   
   But I want to crop this picture, so I'm going to tell it to make the photo larger so I can work on it.
   
   
4. In the "New Size" box, I typed 800 for width. Then I clicked "apply changes." It's now too large, but I'm going to use just part of it.
   
   
5. Now I click "Crop image" above and left of the image. I get a tool that I can drag, move, and reshape, and it shows me what dimensions the cropped image will be.
   
   
6. You can type the dimensions manually if you need to make the selection box a certain size-- which is handy for matching the height of other photos in your gallery. The lock button forces it to shrink/grow the selection box proportionally.
   
   
   
   
7. When you have the cropping box exactly right, click "apply changes" below the picture. Ta-da!
   
   
8. Below the image are a few special effects controls. Try giving it a border. I like a border of 1, padding 2, edge 1 to give a finished look. There's also rounded corners option!
   
   
9. There are "Undo" and "Cancel" links at each stage. Remember to "apply changes" after you've gotten an effect just right -- it's only a preview until you click that button. Or if you get totally messed up, click "start over."
   
   
   


10. When you're ready, click "download this image." It saves the image wherever your web browser usually saves things you download from the web.
    
    
11. Personally, I prefer to decide where to save the image. Right-click (contrl-click with a trackpad) the picture and chose "Save Image As..." to pick where you want to save it. Be sure to name it something new, so you don't replace the original photo!
    
    
12. Now you've got a resized crop that you can upload into the Photo Gallery.