At the NSLax site, you will not only need to prepare a "profile image" (picture of yourself), but you may also make photo albums of you and your team mates. So the site can work well, you need to know a little bit about how to upload the right kind of images.

Camera vs. monitor resolution. If you have pictures from a digital camera, the chances are that the images are BIG by web standards. Computer monitors "see" at a resolution of 72 dots per inch (dpi, which is the same as "pixels per inch," ppi). The normal refinement a monitor or camera can "see" at is called its "resolution". while cameras most often produce images that have a resolution of 150-300 dots per inch. Try to upload an image from your camera to the internet and it may be s-l-o-w going. In most cases, the image will be in JPEG format, which is a file with the suffix ".jpg."

Image Specs. The pictures you want to upload should be JPEGs at 72 dpi at 100%. If your picture is at 72 dpi, it will be sized at 100% of the dimension you see on your screen.

Profile Image Specs. As indicated in the registration and editing component, the picture you make of yourself should be no more than 200 pixels (dots) wide by 200 pixels (dots) high. It's OK if it's less, just not more — in fact, likely it will be less 'cause an image that dimension is kind of strange. The finished file, let's call it yourpic.jpg should "weigh" (have a file size of) no more than 2000 KB (kilobytes) which translates as 2 MB (megabytes), which is actually HUGE. A 200x200 pixel photo compressed by Photoshop as a JPEG weighs in at around 20 KB! When you're finished editing your file, you should be able to look at it in a Windows window or on a Mac Finder window and see how many kilobytes or megabytes it is in the file description.

Editing Images. To get your images to these specs, open them in Photoshop, Paint or some other image editing program, resize them and select 72 dpi as the resolution, and save. A simple way to get pictures ready for the Interrnet is to prepare them online, with such easy-to-use editors such as FotoFlexer. In such online programs, you upload a picture to the site, work on it there, then download the finished image.