Tiny Images

Continuing my look at the trials and tribulations we as web designers all experience - on a weekly basis!

After Nephew's building sites for £50 and Sites not appearing on Google instantly, the next one to look at must be images. This will probably continue over to tomorrow!

The next thing that's often done is providing usuitable images. I don't mean adult (!!!) - just not suitable for their purpose. Recently I was passed an image, about 150 by 100 pixels, and asked to use it to fill the entire screen - as seen by my customer on his wide screen monitor. Now that's never going to work and when you tell the customer the reply is 'Well you're a web designer, can't you just improve the photograph?'.

If it's a photo they have rights to (more about that tomorrow...) then it should easily be possible to provide more than a tiny thumbnail. But the thing is, when a replacement comes, it's the same size and again I'm asked to improve it. But how can I take a tiny photograph and make it look good 1000 pixels or more across? Maybe if I had a team of fantastic graphic designers behind me and was charging a suitable amount, but when I'm getting an average of a few hundred per site, ther just isn't the time and money to invest in fancy software to sort these pictures out - if it exists.

I blame the TV. How often do you watch these spy programs and they take a tiny image with an unrecognisable blob of a face and blow it up to a massive size and make it clearly recognisable? People assume this technology is genuinely there and available for everyone? But if there's only 150 pixels across in the photograph you provide for me, then I'm not going to be able to do much with the resolution.

These were intended to be light hearted - thinkl they are turning into a moaning session! Will have to watch out.