Photobird Daily

“zooming Manhattan”
© Copyright Rafa Torcida

Speed is very important to me when I visit websites. I want websites to appear in my web browser very quickly. I’m sure you feel the same way. No one likes waiting around for websites.

With that goal in mind, your photos and photo albums display very quickly when they’re on Photobird.com. As I wrote a couple of weeks ago, when I designed Photobird.com, I wanted your photo albums to be really easy to use, fast, and have a nice, clean design so they would be nice to look at.

Here’s how we make your photos display very quickly, and I’ll explain some additional options you have in your photo albums.

When you add your photos to your photo albums on Photobird.com, the following happens:

1. A copy is made of each photo.
2. Your originals are stored securely and unmodified.
3. The copy of each photo is automatically resized so it displays quickly in your photo album.

We’ve fine-tuned our back-end, web server architecture to ensure that your photos and photo albums appear quickly in your web browser. You’ll find that your pictures display faster on Photobird.com than pictures display on most if not all other websites — including websites that you build yourself. That speed is important to me, and I’m sure it’s important to you as well. Yet, I’m still not completely satisfied; I think there’s still room for improvement, to make your photos display even faster, or at the very least, improve the viewing experience in your photo albums.

Note that you can add photos of any size to your photo albums. You can add a 100MB photo file if you want, if you can find one that large. Your original photo will still be stored unmodified, and we’ll make a copy of it and resize it so that it displays quickly in your photo album.

Your photos are also resized so that they will appear correctly in your web browser. Most unmodified photo files from your camera would appear larger than your computer screen if we didn’t resize them. If we didn’t resize your photos, you would need to scroll around within your browser window to see the entire photo, and it wouldn’t be a good experience. Resizing your photos improves that so you can easily and quickly see your photos.

By default, your photos are automatically resized to 640 pixels wide, which is a standard dimension for photos. It’s also a very good size so that even people with small computer screens can see your photos.

You have the option, of course, to choose a different display size for your photos. And you can choose a different display size for each photo album. For example, you may have some vacation photos in one album that you want to appear large, but on the other hand, you may have some photos of items that you’re selling on eBay, and those photos should appear smaller when you link to them from eBay.

To change the display size for the photos in a specific photo album, just follow these quick and easy steps:

1. Go to the photo album you want to change and click on the “Edit Album Options” button.
2. Under “Photo display size:”, choose how many pixels wide you’d like to make the photos by selecting one of the options. Note that you can choose to make the photos in this album the same size as the photos in the album that this album resides in. Therefore, it’s very easy to change a lot of albums at once, without needing to change every individual album.
3. Click on the “Save Changes” button at the bottom of the page.

That’s it! The photos in your photo album will now be shown in the size you’ve selected.

If you use special post-processing on your photos, and you don’t want your photos resized or touched when you add them to your photo album, simply choose to display your photos in “Original” size, and they will appear in your photo album as large or as small as you have made them, without modification. You can resize and process your photos the way you want on your computer before you add them to your photo albums.

Of course, we have many ideas that we’re working on to improve these features, including allowing photos to be resized automatically when you resize your web browser’s window.

If you have any questions about these features or any other feature on Photobird.com, please let us know in the comments here or in the forums.

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