How do I make photos large?

This comes from Brooke: "Question for you. In order for my pictures on my blog to not be dinky I have to add the photo as a gadget and then add the text as a text gadget below. Now they wont archive! How are you adding yours? As a blog? do you think it is the page I choose?"

I've been asked this question before and I thought others might like to know how to make photos larger and still archive them. It's really easy, just a little more time consuming than the blogger uploading tool.

You have to use a third party (outside hosting site) and then copy and paste the URL into the new blog post. (Do not use the photo upload button.) I use photobucket. (I add photos there first.) I know flickr also works as well as many others.

Copy the HTML from photobucket (for that photo) and paste photo into the new post. Click EDIT HTML and then COMPOSE at the top. From there you can resize your photos. (I also click on Edit Html after I resize and manually set the height and width to match so they don't show up distorted on emails that are automatically sent from my blog. You can ignore this if you don't have your blog set up to send emails.)

You have to also reset your margins in your blog to have larger photos. Click on LAYOUT tab at the top of screen. Click on EDIT HTML. Scroll down to "header wrapper". I have mine currently set to 1000px. Then scroll to "outer wrapper". That is also set to 1000px. "Main wrapper" is set to 700px and "side-bar wrapper" is set to 250px, allowing for a small space in between. (The main wrapper and side-bar wrapper and space must equal the outer wrapper total.) The only downfall to changing your margins would be that those cute backgrounds from "cutest blog on the block" or "delightful dots" aren't always compatible. You could play around with it. I know there is 2 and 3 columned back drops. I have opted to keep a plain colored background for that reason.

Once you change your settings in layout it will be set for future photos. That is, unless you want to change it again. I have had mine set to 700px wide, limiting the size of my photos, in order to view them on my monitor. Now that I have a much wider monitor I may be playing around with the settings again and increasing the width of my blog, thus allowing for larger photos.

I also found a great tutorial which is much better illustrated than mine. You can find it here. (I haven't yet figured out how to freeze the frame as she has done.) She set her outer wrapper to 1200, main wrapper to 900, and side-bar wrapper to 220. I wish I'd have had this tutorial when I was trying to figure it all out.

Hope that helps. If you need further assistance feel free to email me at lish@mchsi.com.