You have a few options for editing photos for your blog posts.  It’s up to you which program you’d like to use for editing photos (information for Preview and iPhoto is included here, but there’s also Gimp, which is a program all MHC laptops come equipped with), but take some time to become comfortable with one or the other and start posting!

Resizing:

1.  Open your photo in Preview (the default application when you open a photo file).

2.  Under the “tools” option in the header menu, click on “adjust size,” and then click on “fit into” in the box that opens.  You can adjust the size here, and usually something around 800 x 600 pixels works well.

3.  Save, and upload to your post!

Cropping: When you want to manipulate the size and shape of a photograph, it’s easy to do:

1. In Preview: use the “select” tool (there’s a menu of tool icons that pops up in the header, and when you hover over them, the name of their functionality pops up.  “Select” is the one that looks like a square with a dash-mark edge).  Use this tool to select what shape you’d like the photo to be, and then choose “crop” from the “tools” menu.

2. In iPhoto: click on the photo you want to work on, and you’ll see a menu of options pop up underneath the picture.  Choose “crop” and drag to the size you want.

Don’t forget to save before uploading!

Adjusting: Sometimes you need to mess with a photograph to get it to look the way you’d like for a post.  Maybe the exposure wasn’t quite long enough, or there was a piece of dust on your lens that is obscuring the image.  You’ll find all sorts of neat tools to work with when you click on “adjust” in iPhoto:

You can adjust a photo in Preview in much the same way — click “adjust photo” in the dropdown menu under “tools” in the header:

Feel free to email me with any further questions, or drop by my office hours!

-Kiersten