Image management is an important part of your website. There will be some standard settings that will be put in place by your project manager accoring to the design, and your preferences.

Please consider how images will be used on the site, it is good to take a consitent approach to image management.

Ideally standard content images will be 200px width. To retain the image quality it is best to resize and edit images outside of the website image management tool. 

A great free, online image management tool is http://pixlr.com/ or the express URl which has less options, but is easy to use and allows cropping, resizing etc is http://pixlr.com/express/

Image file sizes can be quite small around 40kb is fine, many photos taken with cameras will be 1MB+ which is way too large for the web. Large images slow down page loading and chew your visitors bandwidth, as a result we restrict the size of images that can uploaded (although we do leave breathing space), so you will get an error message if your image is way too large.

When you save images from Pixlr you will be able to choose the quality and sze of the image, so you can control this using this tool.

Using Pixlr at a minimum you should:

• Crop your image (if necessary);
• Resize your image (200px width preferred); and
• Save your image and check the file size is around 40kb.

Image settings that will be established in the back end of Joomla! by your project manager are:

• Caption style;
• Padding between text and image;
• Borders; and
• Alignment.

It is worth considering if you will use captions in your images, you don’t need to use caption for every image, but if you would like to use them let your project manager know.

Padding between text and images will be set up in the default parameters, but you will be able to override this if required.

Borders should be used consistently to match the style of the site, these will be set up in the parameter section and be applied by default when you add a new image.

Right alignment works best on websites due to the way right aligned images work with surrounding design, and due to the natural way people take website images in, this has been set in your site by default.