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Smart Photos - a step-by-step tutorial

The Xara Online web page module system supports what we call 'Smart Photos'. Instead of placing a plain JPG photo file on your web page, by placing a 'Smart Photo module' instead you gain a number of benefits. Smart Photo modules are one of a wide range of different web page modules that you can easily add to any web site. You can access Modules at www.xaraonline.com

Smart Photo benefits

	By placing a 'smart photo' on your website you can change the photo afterwards without altering any HTML on your web page, so no more uploads or re-publishing of your website when you want to alter your photos
	Easy to use online photo tools. Enlarge, reduce, crop, rotate, apply effects and enhance you photos in a number of ways
	Optimize the photo for the best balance between quality and download speed
	Thumbnails. Creating thumbnail photos that display a larger version when clicked overcomes one of the basic dilemmas for good web pages. This can be a tedious and complex process that Xara Online photo modules simplifies and completely automates
	All the photo tools, and indeed the online photo storage, management and hosting are controlled using a web browser and accessed via a password protected entry. You can access, edit and manage your photos from anywhere in the world. The photo module can be your central management and storage of all your web photos
	Animated photos. You can apply a variety of Java animations to your photos
	All Xara Online photo editing tools are non-destructive. No matter how much you crop, distort or mess with your photos you can always 'undo' back to the original unmodified photo. Unlike most typical photo processing software your photos do not suffer cumulative distortion
	A number of other benefits such as a mechanism for photo distribution

So how do Smart Photos work?

First you upload your photos to your private, password protected, online store. From there you can manage, edit, enhance the photos using the online photo processing tools. When you want to add a photo to your website you select the 'save and publish' option which will return a simple HTML snippet (half a line of HTML). By adding this snippet to your website you are adding a smart photo to your website.

So instead of embedding the actual JPG file into the web page, you embed a small HTML snippet. When your web page is viewed, the snippet turns into the full picture that looks exactly like a normal JPEG picture, except you have the benefits listed above. Below we take you step-by-step through the process of getting your photos online, optimizing, enhancing, creating thumbnails and more.

Obtaining your photo

The first stage is usually the most tricky - you've got to get your photo onto your computer somehow. It's beyond the scope of this article to tell you how to do this since it will depend entirely what what equipment you are using. Typically it will be one of two ways; either from a digital camera or from a flatbed scanner. If you want the very best quality then use a slide scanner to scan your 35mm negatives, although digital cameras are now able to give the best traditional cameras a run for their money - and typically produce better results than scanning a print with a flatbed scanner.

Scanned from an old print, using a good quality flat-bed scanner.

Scanned from the negative with a slide scanner. Unprocessed.

You need to get the photo file in JPG format on your computer. Following the guidelines above, a typical photo might be something like 30K and perhaps 400 pixels across. However because we're going to use the Xara Online Smart Photo module we will use a larger photo and use the photo editor facilities to reduce it in size afterwards. Therefore you should aim to create a JPG photo file that's say around 800 pixels across up to approximately 150K is size. If the photo is much larger than this - say 500K or more than 1200 pixels across it will almost certainly be way too large.

© Charles Moir 2002