Fresh

A never-ending battle has been raging since days of old about the virtues of custom, project-specific photography vs. stock photography. Each has its benefits and drawbacks and depending on your role in a project you could be on one side of the fence or the other. I am a designer with an extensive photography background. I have a bias, so if you’re looking for a true comparison as to which is better, stock vs. custom, look somewhere else. I have very clear views on the role of photography in design and how it can help achieve the goals of a given project. Achieving the goals of the client are always the top priority and finding the best way to do that is the responsibility of the designer.

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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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