This page is all about uploading pictures to use on this site.  For best results please read these short topics before you try this out.

If you want an identification

Please post your query on the forum or use the contact us page.

How to Upload a picture

You can upload an image file from your computer directly by clicking the 'picture upload' button in your toolbar (you need to be logged-on to use this).  Simply choose your file, give it a Title and click the 'Upload Picture' button.  When the file is processed you will see a preview copy - you can reject this if not happy - or just continue.  Please remember to wait for the file to be transferred from your computer to the server - this will obviously take longer for bigger files.

Picture Tile

Required.  The Title you give your picture is important.  This has the same naming rules as a 'Page Name' (you can use letters, numbers, spaces, or - . ( ) ! ' ) and should be used in a similar way to a page name.  There is a limit of 64 characters maximum.  The Title is always used to refer to this picture once it is uploaded.  All picture titles must be unique and should reflect the image content.  You can also give your picture a 'Subject' and a 'Location' (see below) so it isn't necessarily important to give these in the Title.  To see Titles currently in use you can look through the A-Z Picture Index.

Picture Credit

Optional but important.  The picture Credit should acknowledge the photographer and/or the copyright holder by name.

Picture Location

Optional.  You can state the location for the picture here.  Locations are useful particularly if they can be resolved using our Locate function.  This allows anyone to 'visit' the location for the image.  You can use place names, grid-references or "latitude, longitude" and you can also state this as "position:location" (that is with a colon between the grid-reference position and the named location).  Example: ST543214:My location. Don't use spaces within the grid reference.

If your picture comes from a GPS enabled camera then the server will extract the position.  If you give no location then the camera position will be used, if you give a named location then the position will be prefixed to your given location.

Picture Subject

Optional but very useful.  You can add a species name as a subject, but please only do this if you are sure of an identification or it has been confirmed.  If names match those in the Species Index then pictures of species can be used automatically in a number of pages on this website. Pictures of site locations will also be included in site accounts if the picture subject matches an existing site name.

Picture Copyright

Optional.  You can add a copyright statement that will replace the standard declaration of: "The Copyright © for this image is with the picture Credit given above and it may be used in any non-commercial way provided this is stated, together with the given Permalink as source.  All other rights reserved."

After you have uploaded

When your picture is uploaded we create three new images from it:

• A small 'thumbnail' of the image (no larger than 100 pixels)
• A 'snapshot' view that is sized to 360 pixels maximum in height or width and
• A 'picture' view that is sized to 720 pixels maximum in height or width

All three sizes can be used on the website in various ways.  Your original file is then discarded.

A note on File and Picture Size

We have some simple 'house' rules for pictures that help to keep the website consistent and as user-friendly as possible:

1. Files that are bigger than 60M bytes are rejected.
   
   
2. Files that are larger than 720 pixels in width or height are automatically reduced to this 'house' size.  Their aspect ratio is preserved.  The online processing to resize your image uses re-sampling to preserve quality and renders a jpg at 90%.  Note that snapshots are created at 97% quality and thumbnails at 100% quality.  There will always be some 'softening' of the reduced size images due to processing.
   
   
3. Files should be in jpg or png format - jpg is preferred for general 'photo' images and png is better for 'line-art' or graphics.
   
   
4. You can choose not to have your image processed: if you have an image that you have pre-processed for use on the web and it doesn't exceed the size limit of 1. above, or, you have already done the house style optimisation yourself (to size to 720 pixels max).

If you can, you should make every effort to make your pictures suitable prior to upload - using any Photo Editing software.  If you have pre-processed to 720 pixels maximum in height or width, then tick the option 'do not process my image'.  This will keep your image exactly as it is for the main 'picture' and the website will create the smaller images (snapshot and thumbnail) from that.

If you can't easily pre-process your images: then just upload the files (provided that the original file is less than 2Mb) and the server will try to convert them to 'house style'. Pictures taken directly from digital cameras now can be very big however - and often need to be re-sized first.  If you can reduce to say 800x600 first, then the server will usually handle these happily.

Please Note: A normal page full width is 760 pixels.

If you have a high resolution image where sufficient detail isn't preserved at 720 pixels for a particular area of interest within the picture, then consider uploading the overall view and then cropped area(s) showing detail.

See also: Pictures Recently Uploaded - Markup Reference - Picture Upload