Have you ever gotten an email from a relative that you have to piece together by scrolling around the photo because it is much bigger than the screen? This is mildly disconcerting because you worry what Uncle Larry took a picture of at first and annoying because it takes so long to get the full picture.

The same problem exists on some farm websites. Photos need to be optimized for web viewing which means they need to be small enough to view on a single monitor and load quickly even on slower connections. Since photos immediately connect your customers to the production of their food, it is important to get this right.

Modern digital cameras take very high quality photos that are perfect if you are zooming into a photo or want to make prints, but in their unprocessed form they are almost unusable on a website.

The software that powers Small Farm Central automatically resizes photos to an acceptable size, but even then some farmers have problems getting the photo to the servers because there is so much unnecessary data in the file. Try resizing your photos first -- if it was taking you a few minutes to upload your photo before, after resizing your photos it should take around 10-15 seconds to get the photo to upload.

If you run Windows, a great piece of software is Picasa which allows you to resize photos in large batches. Read this help document to learn how to resize photos with Picasa. The software has a great interface and a lot of other photo editing tools, so it is definitely worth the download.

If you are on Mac, I don't have as clear of a recommendation. I found this video which explains how to use Apple Mail to resize photos. Perhaps there is a better way? Let the community know in comments.

This advice stands for any farm website you are running, whether it is Small Farm Central or not. We do take care the smaller details of creating thumbnails and sizing the photos correctly, but if you are running your own website, look to resize your full size photos to around 640 x 480 pixels.

(Photo by tanakawho)