Adding photographs and graphics to your advocate or program website can make it more attractive and can be a great tool for highlighting volunteers, staff and events. Digital cameras have been taking photo-quality images for quite a few years. Unfortunately, these files are often much larger than what is optimal for web use. Large images take longer to download, which can slow your website and increase the load on Pro Bono Net's servers.

Although ActivEdit will let you resize images, it doesn't actually reduce the file size and it can make shrunken images look pixelated and fuzzy. We recommend resizing your image before uploading them through ActivEdit.

Thankfully, there are a number of free online applications that allow you to easily shrink and crop your photographs so they look their best. Using drag-and-drop visual tools, you can quickly optimize the size of your photographs without worrying about file formats or getting the exact pixel size.

Some of them even allow you to apply professional looking photographic effects, automatically enhance the color, and even will help remove red-eye effects!

Two popular examples of these online tools are Pixenate and Snipshot.

If you prefer a traditional Windows desktop program, Paint.NET offers robust functionality at a very reasonable price (free!). It offers many more features than the online applications but it is also more complex.

If you have general questions about optimizing your images for the web, please contact your Circuit Rider or email support@lawhelp.org.