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Teaching, Vol 8, No. 2 x 12 Ontario School Library Association A Picture is A Picture is WWororth a th a Thousand WThousand Worords...ds... Putting Great Putting Great Pictures Pictures on Yon Yourour LibrarLibrary y WWeb Siteeb Site by Diane Bédard Great things are happening every day in yourschool library resource centre - successfulresearch projects, positive use of the internet, enthusiastic story circles, dynamic guest speakers - so be an advocate for your program! Brag about these great happenings, even if they seem "everyday" fare to you! How can you have the broadest impact and share your success story with the entire school communi- ty? Capture these great events in pictures and share these images on your library web site. With simple access to a scanner or a digital camera you can easily include the photo in an on-line photo album (many scanners and cameras even come with simple soft- ware which streamlines this process for you). There is really only small (pun intended!) consideration when sharing photos ... think small! The greatest sin when mounting photo images on the web is to ignore the download time you are inflicting on the visitor to your site. While you may find an image worth waiting for, most users will quickly hit the back button and be gone. So what do you do to make those great snapshots that you took show up on the web site in a user friendly format? Whether you used a regular film camera or a digital camera, the process is the same... think small! By small, I refer to the actual size of the saved image. How many kilobytes (K) of data are you expecting the web site visitor to wait for? An aver- age dial-up connection (and most people STILL live that way!) will download about 2K per sec- ond... so a 40K image will take 20 seconds, and that's about as long as the casual user will wait. (Grandparents have been known to wait for over 10 minutes... but they're not normal users!) If you take the standard file from a digital camera, or scan in a standard photo on a scanner, the first thing you'll notice is that the file size can range from 300K to over 1 MB. There definitely need to be some adjustments before sharing this image across the web. The average image from a scanner or a camera is