Fresh

Recently I was on the lookout for an easy way for clients to resize images prior to uploading them to their WordPress blog.  I had already used up the handy ‘thumbnail’ and ‘medium’ sizing rules built into WordPress, and was needing to resize the original to a maximum width or height of 600 pixels.  A quick search for plugins to do this for me failed, and I quickly decided I didn’t have the time or knowledge to whip up some server-side resizing code for myself.

So resizing images before uploading needed to be a part of the process of adding new content to the website.  From past experiences I know that just instructing a blogger or webmaster to ‘resize your image to 600 pixels wide’ is not necessarily enough to get them going, if they are not well-versed in the ways of image editing.  Even if they can take the red-eye out of their family photos in Photoshop, that doesn’t mean they know how to prepare an image for web.  When they upload their vacation pics to Flickr, it does all the resizing and prep work for them.  But we’re not developing Flickr-level apps over here. (Yet, anyway.)

So how to simplify this whole process so that it creates the least amount of frustration and confusion?

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