Updating the Website Slideshow

Overview

Updating the website slideshow is something that can freshen the look of our front page. Doing so requires one to collect the new images, prepare them, and then send them to an administrative user for upload onto the site. The steps are detailed below.

OLD STUFF

THIS IS HOW WE USED TO DO IT MANUALLY. Don't do this anymore. This is here for reference until the new method has been used in practice a few times.

Collect the Images

Collect new images to display - primary source should be our Smugmug gallery Choose images that are high enough resolution to not look fuzzy or grainy when sized to "full screen" of modern computers. Good images are ones that highlight the team activities and are relatively self-explanatory. The image should be understandable to people not involved with the team!! The best ones are the ones understandable and interesting to non-FIRST savvy people while still promoting what our team is.

When downloading the images from Smugmug, be sure to grab either the very large or original size image. You will resize it to something appropriate later, but you need to start with an image larger than the target size.

Convert the Images

If any of the images are not jpeg (.jpg), you must convert them to jpg. Use Photoshop, Gimp, or some other tool. Photoshop is available on the school computers as of the time of this writing.

Organize the Images

Place all the photos in a single folder on your computer; do not use any sub folders! Once you have them, decide on the order you want them to display on the front page slideshow. The first image should be something very team oriented such as a team photo at a competition event or community event.

Rename the images such that they are named as follows:

• image1.jpg
• image2.jpg
• image3.jpg
• ....
• image9.jpg
• image10.jpg
• ... continue as needed

Note Carefully: The website computer system treats file names as case sensitive. Please use all lower case for files, including the .jpg extension!

Resize the Images

Using gimp or photoshop or other tool, resize every image to exactly 600 wide by 460 tall. You may need to crop the image if the aspect ratio of the image is different than 4.6:6 (it probably will be!). Once you have the aspect ratio correct, scale it to the size above.

Caption the Images

Create a text file in the folder with the images named captions.txt. Use plain text not Word document or anything else. You can use "notepad" on Windows to do this if you wish.

In the file, put ONE CAPTION PER LINE. It should look something like this:

This is the Caption for image1.jpg
And here for image2.jpg
aaaaand here for image3.jpg
... etc ...

Captions are mandatory for every image - the number of lines will equal the number of images when you are done. Please keep them in order with the images you chose.

Captions should be formatted as they will appear -- that is, using proper capitalization and punctuation. Treat it like a title (This is a Good Caption; this is not because it has no caps...) The length should be short. If too long it may be truncated.

Package the images and captions

ZIP the entire folder to a name of your choice. In Windows you can right click your folder and "Send To Compressed folder".

Send the resulting ZIP file to Jeff Downs for upload. Please keep in mind it takes a day or two for upload.

TLDR

1. Get images and place in a single folder together.
2. Convert all to jpeg/jpg
3. Resize all to exactly 600x460
4. Rename so they are in order as image1.jpg, image2.jpg, ..., image9.jpg, image10.jpg, ...
5. Caption for each image on its own line in order in a file caption.txt
6. ZIP result
7. Email zip to Jeff Downs