Are you photo uploads taking a long time, failing before they are done, or even after they are done?

The problem is that your photos are too large. Modern digital cameras take very high quality photos that are great if you are zooming into a photo or want to make prints. However, these high quality photos are not suited to the Internet.

The software that runs Small Farm Central automatically resizes your photos to an acceptable size after they are uploaded, but you may run into problems if your photos are too big to get to the server in the first place.

You need to resize your photos first. If uploading each photo is taking several minutes right now, after you resize your photos, it should take less than 10 seconds for each photo.

A free program called Picasa can help (for Windows computers). You can download the program and read about how to resize photos at:
http://picasa.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=13821 [1]

Resizing to approximately 800 pixels is a good number that keeps the quality high but also will upload fast. Once you have uploaded the photo, the Small Farm Central software will automatically optimize the photo to display it on your website.

Hint: Picasa allows easy export of many photos at once. Just select all the photos you want to upload to your site, click export (as referenced in the help file), and it will resize all the photos at once. This can save you a lot of time!

Be careful not to overwrite your original photos from your digital camera. You will want to leave your high-quality originals intact for other uses.