Some Journey

How are you resizing the image?

When I check the properties of the image (right-click on the image; select "properties") it shows it as 3008x2000 pixels. That's very large. You need to resize the image, not the file. It's the size in pixels (like 640x480 vs 3008x2000) that needs to be adjusted.

Also, since I'm not familiar with chattablogs and don't know the upload/resizing process, you can resize the image with various pieces of software. One free one is "Easy Thumbnails" from Fookes Software at www.fookes.com. That's what I use.

Yeah, gcw is right. You need a program that resizes the photos for the web. You're killing me, since my cable modem is out and I'm on dial-up.

You want to save the photos as jpegs at "60" quality and 72 ppi. I save my photoblog photos at 640 x 480. What it appears that you are doing is saving the photos at the full resolution, but then sizing them on the blog using tags. This does nothing to change the properties of the photo, only how it is displayed on the page.

You need to find out if Chattablogs has installed the necessary MT plugins to handle the pop-ups. I don't use MT, but on WordPress and Textpattern you need a plugin (additional code) in order to do pop-ups. Without it you'll need to save the photos at a size that will fit within the margins of your blog template (maybe no more than 400 - 450 pixels wide).

To clarify what I said earlier, you technically don't need a plugin to handle the pop-ups. It just makes it more easy. For example, with the one I have in WordPress all you do is upload the image. The plugin creates the thumbnail image and the code (even inserts it into the post). The only thing it doesn't do is add float tags (i.e., to wrap text around the image). That, however, would be dependent on your CSS.

Anyway, if you resized the image to the size you wanted people to see it at, then created the thumbnail image (the size it should be in your post), then you would just arrange the code in your post like this (size of thumbnail is an example only):

[a href="http://somejourney.chattablogs.com/path_to_your_images_folder/large_image.jpg"][img src="http://somejourney.chattablogs.com/path_to_your_images_folder/smallimage.jpg" width="100" height="75" alt="Mountains of Acapulco"/][/a]

Now, there are some plugins that actually generate pop-up windows, but in my experience they're kind of buggy. That is, the one that I use on my Textpattern blog works great in Firefox, but in IE it puts scroll bars on the pop-up. You can control it with JS code, I believe, but that's a lot of work and the way I showed you above is simple and web standards compliant. If you wanted to have the image open in a new window, then add the following attribute to the first piece of code:

target="_blank"

[a href="http://somejourney.chattablogs.com/path_to_your_images_folder/large_image.jpg" target="_blank"]

To further clarify Scott's "you're killing me" comment, you really need to resize the inline images that are not popups as well. You're specifying the display size (not sure how chattablogs is doing it, but in html that would be within the tag), so it displays OK, but those image files are full size, so each one of them is 600K to 800K or so bytes in size. You've got 8 on the page at the moment, so there are several megabytes to be downloaded to display your blog page - that kills a dial-up connection. If you were to resize the image before uploading (apparently Chattablogs doesn't resize; the forum photo albums on our website resizes as part of the upload process), the 240x360 (display size)image would probably be around a 40K byte file rather than a 600K+ file.

The EZ Thumbs software I referenced above adds a "create thumbnail" option to the Windows Explorer file display, so you can right-click on an image and select "create thumbnail" to create a new, resized image. You can use the EZ Thumbs settings to set the size of the thumbnail being created. It also has a graphical interface you can use to resize multiple images at the same time. (Not trying to sell the free product, it just works for me.)

And if you don't learn how to resize your photos, then I'll just have to confiscate your D70 in order to conserve Chattablog's bandwidth ;-)

Thanks for your help, guys. And, um, nice try, Scott. :)

I recommend checking out flickr.com for ease of use and organizing. I'm going to be transitioning to it over the next few posts. You can upload batches of pictures instead of doing them one at a time. It also has some neat tagging and labeling features.