Integrated Web Services

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Images (photos and drawings) make your web pages more attractive, interesting and informative. This guide introduces you to the kind and quality of images we'll need to design and build your site.  

We'll generally need two categories of images: "campaign" photos for the design and beauty of your top-level pages (e.g., for your home page) and "internal" images for deeper content pages (e.g., illustrating faculty profiles, facilities descriptions, event announcements or providing other visual context). We'll work closely with you to find, create or purchase campaign photos. The internal images we'll need you and your team to supply. Please follow these guidelines on Technical Specifications, How to Give IWS Your Files, and Tips.

Technical Specifications for Images

Creating new images

Starting with high-quality images lets us resize and crop them for maximizing their visual impact. Minimum standards are:

• If you are scanning photos, set the scanner's resolution to at least 150 dpi.
• If you are taking or buying digital photos: images should be at least 960 pixels in height or width. (Most modern cameras will automatically take photos of sufficiently high resolution, but check your camera's settings and choose a higher resolution option if needed.)
• Always request or create these images in an uncompressed format such as TIFF. (We can use JPG images if necessary, but they offer less flexibility in processing.)

Sorting through existing digital images

To reuse any images on your current site, you will need to supply the original source files. We cannot use them directly from the web because web images will have been compressed and so we will not be able to make any size or color/contrast level adjustments to the photo without unacceptably degrading the quality.  

Minimum standards for existing digital photos or other images are at least 960 pixels in height or width. (The dimensions may show if you hover your mouse over the image file in your file explorer.)

Sending Images to IWS

Please send image files to us along with a text file that provides, for each image:

1. The name of the image file (ideally a descriptive one, e.g., person.jpg, alumevent.tif).
   
2. Rollover text that identifies the image content (this text appears when a user hovers a mouse over the image or for browsers that do not display images). Rollover text should be no more than 3 or 4 words long.
   
3. Where the image belongs on your website, as specifically as possible (e.g., 'Department of Life > Students > Admissions' or 'Outreach > Water Quality > Resources' or, if the page structure isn't yet certain, some other indication of what section the image will go in).
   
4. If you want it to have a caption, the exact text for the caption. Captions should be no more than 25 words long.
   
5. If a photo credit is required, the exact text for the photo credit.

For example, create a table in Word or Excel in the following format:

Because uncompressed images are large, you may have trouble emailing them (or have to send a separate email for each image). It may be preferable to write out all of your images to CDs or DVDs and give them to your project manager.

Tips  

Get started early

Images form an integral part of your content. Identify your image needs at the same time as you are drafting the text and other content for your site. If they are an afterthought, that might show on your final site. Also, securing permission to use photos can be time consuming (IWS cannot use any image you don't have permission to use. See www.copyright.cornell.edu for help).

Image sources

Possible sources include:

• Your publications, print collateral, recent poster sessions or publicity.
• Source files of images on your current website.
• University photography image bank http://imagelibrary.photo.cornell.edu/. There is a one-time fee for each UPhoto image placement on a website.
• Photos from IWS' and CIT's stock collections.
  
• Hiring professional photographers, including for faculty or team shots. IWS has a photographer for hire and there are other services in Ithaca as well. If you work with a photographer, be sure you understand who will own the final images, and if the photographer retains ownership, what use you can make of them and what credit must be given.
• Commercial stock photo outlets such as gettyimages.com or Istockphoto.com. These can be “royalty free” (RF) or “royalty managed” (RM). RF images can be very inexpensive; for RM images, costs vary considerably. Check your source’s specifications carefully.

Consider your captions

Captions are meant to supplement your images, not merely to describe them (unlike the rollover text, which should be descriptive). Let the image do the work of expressing the obvious. Use your caption text (try for 25 words max) to convey the not-so-obvious or to bring extra emphasis to a point you're making further along in the body of your page.

For example, compare two possible captions for the image below. Caption B advances an important message--without even reading the body text for this page, visitors learn that Cornell Dining goes out of its way to serve the needs of Cornell students.

Caption A: The bakery at Trillium dining. Caption B: Because Cornellians keep long hours, so do the places they eat--some open as early as 7 a.m. and others serve until 1 a.m.

If you have any questions at all about images for your pages, please don't hesitate to contact your IWS Project Manager!