When you use thumbnails you can fit more graphics on one page. Your reader can pick and choose from all the graphics on the page and decide which ones they want to see.
Creating a thumbnail is not hard and really doesn't take very long. The first thing you will need to do is download a photo or graphic editing program. I use Irfan View. It's free and simple to use. It's not as comprehensive as something like Paint Shop Pro or Photoshop but it's good enough for resizing, cropping and changing the way the colors look.
I'm going to use Irfan View for this lesson. The instructions are not that much different if you are using another program.
The first thing you are going to do is open the image that you want to resize. You do this by clicking "File", "Open", find the image on your computer and click the "Open" button.
With the image open in your graphic editing program you can now crop it or resize it. Cropping is what you do when you have an image that has more on it than what you want to use. Say you have a picture of you and another person but you only want to use the part with you on it and cut off the other person, that's cropping.
To crop it you first need to choose the area you want to keep. Place your mouse cursor at one corner of the area you want to keep, hold down the mouse button and drag your cursor to the opposite corner of the area. You will see a line being created around the area as you do this and a thin border around it when you're done.
Now click on "Edit", "Crop selection". The area you selected will be left and the rest of the picture will be gone. If you like what you see you will want to save the image at this point so you don't accidently close the program and lose the cropping. If you don't like it, click on "Edit", "Undo" and it will go right back to the way it was before you cropped it.
If you want to cut something out of the picture you can do this using the "Cut" feature. You can also add text to your picture at this point using "Insert text into selection". Both of these features are under the "Edit" menu. Remember to save the image after you make a change you like so you don't lose your work.
Now to create our thumbnail. Click on "Image", "Resize/Resample". A box will pop up that will allow you to resize your image. You can choose to resize your image by height and width or by percentage. For example, you can put in a width of 50 pixels or you can have it just make the image 10% of it's original size. If you are creating the thumbnails to use as a photo gallery I suggest trying to make all your images close to the same size so they fit on the page better making nice straight rows or columns.
If your image seems to have lost some of it's clearness when you resized it you can use the "Sharpen" feature in the "Image" menu. When you save the image after resizing it make sure you use the "Save as" feature, NOT the "Save" feature. You will want to give it a different, yet similar, name. If you just save it, it will overwrite your old image and you will loose the original. If your original was called "picture.jpg" then you could call the thumbnail "picture_th.jpg.
Next Page: Add Thumbnails and Link to Graphics
