Chapter 1
Installing IrfanView
and
Opening a Picture
If you already have a program installed on your PC that will resize and convert you picture to JPG format, and know how to use it (this is very important), then you can skip to "Chapter 4 - Creating an Album." However, if you're new to adding pictures to a Forum, then I suggest that you follow along.
In Chapter 1 we'll discuss how to obtain and install IrfanView. Then we'll walk through opening IrfanView and loading a picture into it.
Many users of gallery use a program called IrfanView. What is IrfanView? "IrfanView is a very fast, small, compact and innovative FREEWARE (for non-commercial use) graphic viewer for Windows 9x/ME/NT/2000/XP/2003." So what does all of that translate to? It simply means that IrfanView is free for private use and runs on a Windows PC.
For this book, I will be using IrfanView Version 3.95. It is possible that by the time you read this, IrfanView may have a newer release. I'm certain that newer version will operate the same, but some of the screens may have changed, but the underlying principles will not have changed.
IrfanView can be download for free directly from the author at IrfanView or one of many software repositories on the net such as Download.com. Once downloaded, follow the instructions for installing the program. Version 3.95 comes with some rider software for E-Bay. I recommend that you uncheck these. Remember as always, if you have problems installing or using the program, contact the author not Spadworld.
Finally we're ready to get started with the first step, or the second if you count getting your picture from you digital camera to the PC. You do have your picture on your PC already don't you? If not, you should take a minute and read the "What's Required" section on page 1.
Open IrfanView. You should have a window open similar to figure 1.
Figure 1
Open the picture of your model airplane by selecting "Open ..." from the "File Menu." See figure 2.
Figure 2
The open dialog box will appear. Navigate to where you stored the picture of the airplane. Select your picture and click "Open." The IrfanView window may resize itself to the desktop. This is because the picture is so large.
Figure 3
The picture that I will be using for this demonstration is a picture of my SPADrastic. See figure 3. If you click the "i" with the red circle around it on the tool bar it will display the picture information. See figure 4. My picture in it's original size it 1600 x 1200 and a file size of 457 KB. Yours will be different. So what does all of that mean?
Figure 4
Well it's quite simple actually. The 1600 x 1200 is the size of the picture in what's called "pixels" or dots and the 456.66 KB (467.622 bytes) tells us how much disk space the picture is taking up. That simply means there are 1,600 dots of color across and 1,200 dots down which equates to a picture that has 1,920,000 dots in it. Wow that's a lot dots. There is a lot of other information available from the information screen, but it is beyond the scope of this book.
As you can clearly see, pictures take up a lot of hard drive space and space costs money, lots of money. So help us pay the bills by keeping the file size small. We'll look at the fill size after the conversion to illustrate this point even further.
You can drag and drop your picture from Windows Explore into IrfanView to open it.