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How Do I Use Irfanview? Why Use Irfanview to change graphics?
The Internet sends information from servers (a computer that normally sends information) to clients. A client is your computer or your mother's computer - more specifically a browser (like Internet Explorer, Firefox or Safari) on your computer. Everything that is sent from a server takes time. A 100 page document takes more time to send than a one page document. A photograph takes more time to send than a text document. A very large photo of your dog with a resolution of 1200 DPI (dots per inch) will take a long time to display. People are impatient with waiting and it costs more money to send large things over the Internet than small ones. It also takes more storage space to keep a large photograph on our servers. Since all Yen 9 plans have both bandwidth and disk space limitation it is best to size your photos with this in mind.
Towards this end, you can use IrfanView (or Photoshop or other graphics programs) to resize your photographs. Making the resolution 96 DPI is a common standard that we support. This means there are 96 dots per inch instead of 1200 or 3000.
So to get started double click on IrfanView and it should open, looking something like this:
First, use Windows to navigate to a place where you have a photograph. Create a copy of the photograph and work on the copy. Why? Because the changes you will make, if saved as the original will change your original forever. Several times a day we make mistakes and you don't want to ruin that special sunset you took last summer!
Then drag and drop the copy of your photograph into Irfanview. I have used the photo of a wonderful cabin I once stayed in on Galiano Island in British Columbia, Canada. The original is from a scanned image and its size was 3,645,000 bytes or 3.6 MB. This is far bigger than we want to store on our server and far bigger than people want to wait to see (especially those who connect to the Internet using dial up). Here is a facsimile of my "original":
We want to do three things to this photo before we put it on our website. We want to crop it (trim the edges), we want to change its size so it fits most peoples computers and we want to resample it to reduce the density (change it to 96 DPI).
You'll notice on the right there is part of another cabin and some other messy things. We want to exclude all of this. This is called cropping. In IrfanView this is very easy. We will draw a box around the part we want to keep and eliminate the rest. To do this position your mouse cursor in the upper left hand corner near where the photograph is clear. Like this:
Then hold the left mouse button down and move your mouse towards the lower right-hand corner, stopping just before the image gets messy. This will draw a white box on top of the photograph like this:
Press Ctrl-Y and like magic your photo looks better:
Now we have two things left to do. Click on Image | Resize / Resample and you will see a window like this:
If you study this window you will see that the image is 3300 pixels wide and 2550 pixels wide. In the "Set new size" panel there is a radio button that says inches. Click on this and it will show you something like this:
Studying the window now we can see that the photo is 11 inches wide and 8.5 inches high and has a density of of 300 DPI. Lets change it to four inches wide (the height will change automatically as long as "Preserve aspect ratio" is checked). After changing the width to four inches lets set the DPI to 96 and press OK. Our photo now looks like this:
The size of the new image is now 89 K (89,000 bytes) about 2% of the original meaning it will take 2% of the storage space, 2% of the bandwidth and will load 50 times faster than the original. Save the photo with a name like: "my-cabin-galiano.jpg"
There is much more you can do with IrfanView like remove red-eye from photographs of people, brighten photographs taken in low light and much more. Experiment with it and have fun. As long as you are working on a copy, then there is nothing to break. Enjoy IrfanView!