Here's the deal. Most images on the web are photos taken on a digital camera. Well, those photos are usually of fantastic quality, but they are just too large to put on web pages.

Here's an example. This is a photo my daugther took last week. When you first came to this web page, did you notice that it took the picture on the left much longer to display than the one on the right? It does take longer. To see it again, clear your cache and reload the page.

So, okay, point taken. How do I resize the photos before I put them on the web? If you have Windows XP, it's actually quite simple. Microsoft has a tool available called ImageResizer. You can download it for free from the Microsoft PowerToys for Windows XP web site. After you download it, double click on the file (ImageResizer.exe) to install it.

After it's installed, open up Windows Explorer (you should find it on your Start Menu somewhere, maybe under "Accessories") and navigate through your hard drive to your photos. Find a photo that you want to resize. Right click on the file name, and you'll see a new option in the popup menu called "Resize Pictures".

Select the new "Resize Pictures" option, and you'll see a dialog box like this:

From here, you can follow the prompts based on your needs. If you happen to be working on a web site hosted by smcNet, I recommend that you choose the "Handheld" option as shown above. This will create an image that is 240 x 180 pixels. That's the size of the photos I showed you above, and as you can see, it's a good size for use on a web page. Also, depending on your monitor's settings, if you look closely at the two image samples above, you may notice that the one on the right (the properly sized version) actually looks better. This is because Microsoft's Image Resizer does a much nicer job than your browser at resizing images.

IMPORTANT: You should know that this option will create a copy of your original, and the name of this new file may not be appropriate for the web, especially if it contains spaces. So, before you upload the photo to the web, change the file name to something that makes sense to you, using all lower case characters and be sure to remove any spaces.