Look at this image:
The original, which I found via a Google Image search, was four times the size. There was no way that I could have used it on my site. It simply would have been too wide.
Normally, I would use some image editing software, like Adobe Photoshop Elements, to reduce the size to something manageable. But not all bloggers have access to this kind og software, and my goal is to make it possible for people to blog without having to spend one single dime.
Of course, I could have simply inserted a comment into the image tag to limit the width to something that wouldn't exceed my template width. But that would still have slowed down how long it takes for visitors to upload the image. The image would still contain the same number of pixels, but visitors browsers would simply resize them for viewing. Ugh.
This nifty and free Web tool allowed me to upload the too-large image, and then select how large I wanted the copy to be: 25, 50 or 75 percent of the size of the original. The 25 percent option resulted in the image that would fit. I saved this new, smaller version on my PC, then uploaded it to my free Photobucket account.
Picasa and Hello! are options that work well for Blogspot hosted blogs (since they all are owned by Google, I imagine they would be). But they require the user download software onto their PC, which often isn't an option for students or other people who are blogging from a computer not their own.
