Sizing, Naming & Organizing Pictures for the Web

Regard­less of what soft­ware you use (assum­ing you are not using your prac­tice man­age­ment soft­ware, which would make this a lot more dif­fi­cult), at some point you want to share your pic­tures online or in pho­to­books, maybe the iPad app DDS GP, or some­thing else. When doing so, a stan­dard “post-process” work­flow is key, includ­ing how you name, size, and orga­nize the pictures.

Guide­lines on Nam­ing and Resiz­ing Your Pictures

When first import­ing pho­tos into Light­room, don’t worry about renam­ing them, as that is usu­ally an unnec­es­sary, extra step.  An excep­tion would be if you want the patient name attached to each.  How­ever, when you’re export­ing a num­ber of pic­tures to use for the web, you’ll want to rename them to some­thing that will help them be found by Google, and you’ll want to keep them to a min­i­mum size.

There are some impor­tant keys to remem­ber when using pho­tos online in particular:

1. Pic­ture res­o­lu­tion should be either 72 or 96 ppi (pix­els per inch)
2. Image size should be no more than about 500 pix­els on the long edge
3. Image color space should always be sRGB, since most web browsers do not offer color space man­age­ment (a rather tech­ni­cal topic, to say the least!)
4. Image file size should be 50kb or less
5. The image file name should be short and include key­words that iden­tify what is in the picture
6. The image file name should not include spaces, start with num­bers or other char­ac­ters, and use either “-” (hyphen) or “_” (under­score) in place of spaces.

Some exam­ples of file names would then be along these lines:

• charlotte_porcelain_veneers
• chicago-same-day-crown
• cosmetic_dentist_makeover
• teeth-whitening-before-after

First Use Light­room Collections

I’ve already dis­cussed how I set up an easy-to-use folder struc­ture for your over­all library, but when you want to take cer­tain sets of pic­tures to use for spe­cific pur­poses, you don’t want to have to find them every time.

Light­room has an easy way to cre­ate “Col­lec­tions” of pho­tographs; the “Smart Col­lec­tions” also works well but is a lit­tle trick­ier, so  unless you’re an advanced user, just stick with reg­u­lar Collections.

Found on the left side of the screen in the Library Mod­ule, use the lit­tle (+) but­ton to cre­ate a new Col­lec­tion.  I’m in the process of rework­ing mine, so you don’t see much at the moment.  The Col­lec­tions you cre­ate will obvi­ously reflect the mate­r­ial you want to share, what­ever the format.

Once your Col­lec­tions are cre­ated, all you have to do is Select the pho­tos you want, then Drag them to desired Col­lec­tion and let go of the mouse.  EASY!

Export the Col­lec­tions to Identically-Named Fold­ers and “Add to the Catalog”

(this mate­r­ial to be added soon)