How should I prepare my pictures for the gallery?
Here is how to prepare your pictures for uploading to the galleries.
Summary:
- JPEG format, but not “progressive” jpeg. Either “standard” or “optimized” are just fine, choose “optimized” if you can.
- Save with the Adobe RGB color space profile
- Display only: 1500 pixels on the largest side for display only, e.g. 1500 by 1000 pixels for a 35mm film sized photo
- Display and sell: original picture size, e.g. 4368 by 2912 pixels from my EOS 5D camera
- Captions: Not necessary, but for best results, caption completely. That includes creator, headline/title, caption, date created, city, state, and country.
Picture Size
What is size? It does not refer to how much space your file takes on the computer, which is the “file size.” “Picture size” means the number of dots (or “pixels”) wide and tall the image is. The file size doesn’t matter to us here, as long as it is less than 10 mb (and that is plenty big for any JPEG file).
What size should you save your pictures, to upload them to your gallery? There are two answers….
To show a picture only…
The best picture size to show pictures in an exhibition is 1500 pixels on the largest side. That means, a horizontal picture should be exactly 1500 pixels wide. A vertical picture should be 1500 pixels tall.
The “dpi” (dots per inch) does not matter at all, and it can be anything. If you’re a worrying type, set it to 72 dpi.
Resize to pictures to 1500 pixels on their largest side.
To show a picture and automatically sell fine art prints…
If you want the system to sell your pictures, and you want the system to automatically send printable files to the printer, then you should upload such pictures at the original resolution you took them.
Or, you can make them smaller, if you only want to sell at smaller sizes. In the example below, the picture is sized to 20 inches wide . The system uses 150 dpi as the minimum dpi, which looks good photographs. Most people still think 300 dpi is necessary. It isn’t and never was, but you can use it if it makes you feel good.
Do not resize your picture larger, please, unless you are making the artist decision to have a “rougher” looking image. Enlarging a computer picture does not make sharper at larger sizes.
In case you are wondering, we can handle pictures up to 10MB in size, which covers even 21 megapixel images in JPEG format.
And, yes, “JPEG” is the same as “JPG”.
Keep your pictures to sell at full size, or resize to the largest size you want to sell.
File Format
Always prepare your pictures as JPEG files. Do not used “Progressive” JPEG because the system cannot read them!
Correct file format settings for saving a picture from Photoshop.
Quality = 75 (if, instead of offering 1-100 for quality, the program only offers 1-10, take 7 or 
More Information
The system resizes pictures that you upload for exhibitions. It does a very nice job, and we display unusually large picture files for an Internet website. Why? Because it is your gallery, and it should look good!
We accept files up to 10MB in size, which covers even 21 megapixel images in JPEG format, and much higher. Higher than anyone really needs. The upload may brag about handling bigger files, but it is lying for various technical reasons that would bore the socks off an ethernet data-packet compression engineer.
There is no advantage to using TIFF files, unless you are producing the highest possible quality images, at your fine art printer’s studio, on glossy papers. Yeah, JPEG is “lossy”, but at high quality values, the variation in the paper surface, humidity, and ink is greater than any stray dot that is 1% off the original. If you are really concerned about this, have your printer store your TIFF files, and mark the checkbox on the image information page.