You need to be able to edit photos.

More and more folks are becoming comfortable using Content Management Systems and blogging platforms every day.   But to gain control of content, there’s definitely an increased need for a simple photo editing tool.

Today, even low-end digital cameras are capable of producing higher MegaPixel images than are really necessary for general web use. Even a 3 MegaPixel photo is 2048 x 1536 pixels (that’s a lot). While more than 70% are now viewing websites with browsers of greater resolution than 1024px, 2048px is still far too big for general on-page or in-post use.

So what to do with that way-too-big photo you have on your digital camera?  There are a number of ways to scale it down.  Here are the two easiest…

1) Your designer can use CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) to limit the display size of the image, even though it is still downloading the full-sized image.

2) You can quickly scale or crop the photo using a photo editing tool.

Considering that Google is now incorporating page load-time into their algorithm, it makes the decision even more of a no-brainer than it was before.  Edit your photo.  No question.

There are a wide variety of high-end photo editing tools like Adobe Photoshop, Adobe Fireworks and Gimp. However, the complexity of these tools is generally overkill for small business owners or marketers that are simply working toward updating website content and blog posts.

One of my favorite simple tools for photo editing is Picnick.  It’s simple, effective, easy to use, and inexpensive.  There’s even a very capable free version available.

I made a video on how you can use Picnick to edit, crop, scale and save images using Picnick.  Hope you enjoy…