The correct size and shape of pictures will help a website looking great. If you have a Worship Times site, this especially applies for pictures included in the staff and slider plug-ins, and if you are using featured pages and posts.
WordPress does include some simple cropping tools for your pictures. However, it is easier and less frustrating to edit your pictures prior to loading them to your site.
Helpful Tools
There are a variety of tools you can use to edit your pictures. Most computer operating systems include a simple picture viewer and editor. Adobe Photoshop provides a powerful set of editing tools that can assist not only with simple cropping, but also in color correction and beyond.
Online picture editing programs are available to upload pictures from your desktop and offer the tools to accomplish everything from cropping a picture to creating fliers and graphics for your organization are available. We have used and recommend PicMonkey, Snappa and Canva. All offer free versions with some great basic tools, as well as upgrades to increase services and options.
We encourage you to try out different tools to see which one best fit your needs and comfort level.
Try It Out
Let us use the example of adding a staff photo to your site to illustrate best practices as you edit and add pictures to your site.
Note: It is helpful to know that all picture measurements in WordPress will be noted in pixels, so we will also use pixel measurements in our example.
Here is a sample staff picture (you are not always going to have professional pictures to use):
The standard size for pictures for the Worship Times’ staff plug-in is 125 pixels wide by 145 pixels tall (dimensions for sliders and featured pictures can be found in slider and theme settings). If you let WordPress automatically crop the staff photo, it might look like this:
To better control the look and consistency of your pictures, we recommend:
- Start with a larger version of your pictures.
(Like the sample photo above, much larger than 125×145 pixels.)
- Crop the pictures to have consistent framing.
However you crop your pictures, consistency between the pictures is key. How you do your initial crop will also depend on the size and shape of your pictures – you may not have as much room to play with as our original picture. If your crop doesn’t work, simply undo and begin again.For sliders, it’s best to crop out unnecessary space that takes away from the main focus of the picture. - Resize your pictures.
In this case, we resized to the correct width for the staff picture, because we know we have extra length we will crop out in the final crop. - Do a final crop to your desired size.
You can use this technique to crop any pictures for your site.
Note: Regardless if you use the recommended 125×145 pixels, make sure ALL pictures for staff pages are the same size. This created a uniform page and alignment.
Now you are ready to upload your staff pictures to your Worship Times site!