Making Internet Photos Right

Exchanging photos on the Internet has bcome very common, especially with the rise of good, (fairly) inexpensive digital cameras. When you receive a photo, it is important that it displays correctly - size and colors - or else you will not get the full enjoyment of them.

This is a quick cookbook on what you should do to set up your PC to receive and view photos properly. It won't take long to do, and I am sure it will improve your photo viewing.

  1. The first thing to do is to make sure the contrast and brightness of your display (monitor) are set properly. The best way to do this is to go to this website, where they have a grayscale for calibration - click HERE.

    Start with your contrast at maximum, and brightness about half way (or 50% if that is how your monitor is calibrated). Adjust the brightness until you can see as many levels of gray as you can.

  2. The next step is to understand that the photo display capabilities of Internet Explorer (your web browser) and Outlook Express (your e-mail program) are very limited. The biggest problem is that they do not "scale" the image - i.e. automatically make the image fit your screen. You need something better.

    Anyone interested in cataloging, viewing, and printing photos needs a dedicated photo display or editing program. Fortunately, a very good one is available for free on the Internet. So...

  3. Download the "IrfanView" program from here and install it per instructions.

  4. When you install the program, it will automatically associate itself with various types of image files - the most common being JPEG (.jpg), TIFF (.tif) and Bitmap (.bmp). Thus, whenever you double click on (select) a file of that type, IrfanView will automatically open and show the image.

  5. The next step is to set the options in IrfanView.

    1. During the installation, it will present a list of the file types to be associated with IrfanView. You can, of course, select any you wish, but at a minimum I would select these photo types:
      • BMP/DIB
      • JP2/JPC/J2K
      • JPG/JPEG/JPE
      • TIF/TIFF
    2. When you first start the program, go to the "View" menu option, and click "Fit images to desktop" option.

  6. Finally, you have to use the program! You can use IrfanView as-is to look at folders of photos on your hard drive or CD. But the trick is to use it when you receive an e-mail or with a picture on the web. To do that:

    1. To view a photo from e-mail, disregard any view of the photo shown. Go back to the top of the e-mail and look for the "Attachments" field, In there, you will see a list of the attached photos. Double click on each one in term to view them. You can also right click and select "save" to save them to your hard drive for viewing later.
    2. To view a photo from a web page, you will have to save it to your hard drive first. Right click and select "Save Picture As...".

What about printing a photo? Well, that is a much more extensive topic. If your printer driver has an option that will scale the image to the paper size, then you are probably OK. But if it doesn't, or if you need more options, you will need a more sophisticated program. Call me if you need help in this.

That's it! I hope you will enjoy viewing photos more now. If you have any questions or comments about this cookbook, please e-mail me at bob@bobseidel.com.


Bob