Managing Images in Mahara

When looking at student ePortfolios one of the most common problems I find that students encounter is image/photo management. I remember (not that long ago) paying an obscene amount of money for a Ricoh 1.3 megapixel camera. I sold it on eBay last year for $10. Todays cameras and even phones blow that away, and the resulting file size tends to be 2MB+. Great for a print, but far too big online.

This image is tiny (about 40KB), and it is just a head shot cropped from a much larger photo.

I cropped it from a 2MB photo using Picnik.com a free online photo editing tool. Now I know social media like Facebook will accept large photos, and auto resize them, but currently Mahara won't. So if you upload 10 x 2MB images to a portfolio the page has to load 20MB of images to display. What this means in non geek speak is the page will take forever to load.

There are to main ways to inset images into your ePortfolio. The first is to upload a the image to your image section (then insert image) and the second method is to insert a URL into a text box. I hope in time you will be able to upload directly to a text box, but in the mean time, understanding basic image management is really important anyway. If the image you want to use is already published somewhere else (such as on your web page) you can often just right click on it and copy image location. Try to right click on the image above and you will see - çopy image URL'. Alternatively we have a free upload image tool at http://pics.foliospaces.com/ which generates a URL for you. Just remember to resize it first!!