How to Send Pictures

Taking better photos Do's and Don'ts If you are scanning a picture

Changing size or image type Cropping graphics Save As Sending your graphic

Important:  When you send a graphic, please include your name and the class name in the BODY of the email.  Blank emails look like viruses. 

Do's and Don'ts

Name your graphic.  Begin with YOUR first or last name.  You may then give the picture a descriptive name (carol_blue_logs.jpg) or simply number your pictures (carol_1.jpg, carol_2.jpg).  Do not use any punctuation in the name of your picture.  Use underscores instead of spaces.

Unless you have NO choice, please do not send me to get pictures from an online photo album.  It takes much longer for me and the pictures have no name on them.  Do NOT imbed your pictures in the emails, attach them.  Setting your text to plain prevent the software from imbedding.

Do NOT save your image in a Word document.  While Word will let you do that, it is for word processing and is not graphics software.  Your size will not be accurate and you will not be able to give your picture a name.  We will have to extract each picture individually and give them names.

If you are scanning a picture

When you scan a small photo, the scanner may copy

• the entire scanner bed
• an 8 1/2 by 11" page
• an area that is approximately the same size as the photo

In any case you need to crop out all the excess white space to get the graphic to a manageable size.  Click here for more details about cropping.

Your scanner software should have a button that says something like Selection Border or Crop Tool.  Use this tool to crop the photo.  When you click on it, a box will open outlining the area scanned.   Look at the screen shot below and you can see a little white box in the middle of each side. These are cropping handles.  Put your mouse on one of the cropping handles.  The pointer on your cursor turns to an two-headed arrow, indicating that you have hooked one of the cropping handles.

At this point, your scanner may want you to Accept the picture so that it finishes scanning.  Before you do that, find the area that tells you the RESOLUTION the scanner is using.  Many scanners will default to the highest possible resolution.  This is appropriate for print photograph quality but is excessive for our needs.  The internet is only capable of showing a graphic at 72 dpi (dots per inch).  Choose a resolution that is close to this number.  Lowering the resolution will also automatically reduce the size of your graphic.

Hold down the left mouse button and drag the cropping handle arrow to the edge of the item in the photo.  Do this on any side where the white is showing.

Now that you have JUST the relevant area of your photo, you want to resize your graphic. Look toward the bottom of the screen and see the yellow ruler. Whatever scanner software you use, you should have another choice that says something like Choose Output Size.

Click on that and a dialog box will open. On my scanner, there is an area toward the bottom that says how big the current graphic is.  It will often show it in inches but there should be a little drop down box where you can choose pixels.  You may have to put a check mark beside the words that say Specify Size.  Once you have chosen pixels, there will be a blank beside width and height and you can type a number in the one for width.  Type a number such as 350 and it will automatically put the correct number (to maintain proportion) in the length.

Some newer scanners will open the picture in your graphics software as soon as you have accepted the scan.  You can then use your normal tools to resize the picture.

You are now ready to save this to a file or your desktop,  wherever you store pictures before adding them as an email attachment.  At this point, when you say Save Scanned Image you should have the words Image File in the Send To box at the top of your scanner dialog box. The standard Save As dialog box will open asking where you want to save it and what Type of graphic it is, a gif, jpeg or whatever. 

Note:  Always attach graphics to your email, rather than imbedding them in the email.  Imbedded graphics will become bitmaps and lose any name that you have given them.  Also, do not imbed graphics in Word and send them as a document.  Word will display them as a small picture while the true size may be quite huge.  You have the same situation in which the name of the graphic is lost.

Warning:  Windows defaults to the last thing you did.  So, do not assume that Windows is going to know the right answer.  The general rule of thumb is that photographs look better as jpgs and drawings work as gifs.  Feel free to send everything as jpgs.

Click on Save as type to choose either GIF or JPG

When you return to the scanner, it may ask you to choose the Image Quality.  I choose about 80% and that has worked fine.  This helps to reduce the amount of space the graphic takes up in the computer.

That ends the process for using a scanner.

Changing the Size - Changing the Image Type

If you have created a quilt design or other graphic in Electric Quilt earlier than version 6, the exported graphic is a Bitmap.  This type of graphic is too big to conveniently email or use on a Web page.  You need to convert it to a jpg.  This can be done in Paint which comes on all Windows computers.

Open Paint or your default graphics editing program. Click on Open and navigate to the place where you have saved your picture.  Click on the picture name to open it. Once it is on the screen, click File, Save Selection As and choose JPG as your type in the same kind of Save As box as the one described in the scanner directions. 

Paint does not allow you to resize the image.  If you have a more sophisticated graphics package, you can both change the type and reduce the size.  Choose a width no larger than 500 and the height dimension will change automatically.

Here is a typical screen from Paint Shop Pro, showing the different settings.  The picture that was sent was saved at a high resolution and was consequently very large.  Notice the box called Resample.  Something like this exists in all graphics programs.  You may need to experiment to find the type that gives you the best results.

Cropping Graphics

Cropping is a newspaper word for knocking off the excess on a picture.  Look at this original photo of a landscape quilt.

You are still able to see all the excess wall space that was in the original photograph.  The picture has been resized to 200 pixels wide but we are not getting the full benefit of the 200 pixels.

Sample from Watercolor Wizardry

By using the Crop tool in your graphics program (and even Paint has one), you can eliminate the extraneous background areas and the same 200 pixels results in a much bigger picture of the actual quilt.

If you want to show a close up of a section, it is better to have two pictures.  One can be an overall view as shown above and the other can be a detail shot, such as the one below.  Together they take up less room than one huge graphic and better show the elements you wish to emphasize.

Note the pink 3D triangle

Save As

If you have cropped your graphic in your graphics program, it will be sitting on the screen surrounded by white space.  You MUST choose Save Selection As or your saved file will include the white space.

The flower picture above shows the crop handles still activated.  The white space indicates the areas of the picture that have been removed.  The dotted lines indicate the entire area that will be saved if you choose Save As.  You obviously do not want that area since you have just cropped it out.  The simplest solution is to choose Save Selection As to save only the area marked by the crop handles or by arrows.

Sending Your Graphic

Once you have sized and saved your graphic, you still need to send it.  Your mail program should have an option that allows you to attach a picture or file.  This can be called either Attach or Insert and often has a graphic of a paperclip on your Tool bar.

Click on Attach and a dialog box will open.  Navigate to the place where you have stored the graphic and double click on it.  It will automatically be attached to the email you are sending.