Picture Guidance

It is important to ensure the pictures you upload are of a suitable file size. If the picture files are too large you will be restricting the number you can upload and for people viewing your gallery it will take longer to display.

As a guide pictures should be between 10K - 25K bytes in size. With a standard package this means you can upload approximately 100 pictures.

Use square pictures for best results.

Creating your pictures
The simplest way to create your pictures is to use a digital camera. Take time to set the background for the picture using for example cloth or card. When you take pictures with your camera select the lowest pixel setting eg 0.3M. 

Load the picture onto your computer, this will normally be a JPEG type file. This is a standard file for pictures.

You will find the file size is quite large at this point. Therefore it is best to change the image quality and reduce the file size.
 
In most instances this is very straight forward. Most digital camers come with some photo editing software which will allow you to change the image quality. Load the picture into this software and quite often when you save the file you can change the quality. If you change the image quality to about 35% then this will reduce the size of the file without losing too much quality.

Or in Windows you can edit the picture using Paint. Open Paint (Start >> Programs >> Accessories>>Paint) and use the menu option Image >> Stretch/Skew ... and change the Horizontal and Vertical stretch values to be lower, you will see the picture change size, then save the picture.

If you do not have such software you can download software from the following places:
Picasa from Google