Images

Today I wanted to talk (and show) about the images you put onto your alpaca website or blog. And I must start this entry with a caveat, just as the cobblers children never have any shoes my own website is not perfect when it comes to images. I have two excuses; firstly what I now know I didn't know when I built the web site and secondly there over 1000 images on the site so any re-labelling exercise would be substantial. Do as I say not as I do!

Now that digital cameras are readily available and affordable it is within everyone's ability to snap some pictures of their alpacas. Why pictures? Well if a picture is worth a thousand words. Then a (good) picture of an alpaca is probably the difference between selling and not selling one of your animals.

Having snapped the picture and loaded it onto your PC you now have the opportunity to improve and enhance that picture still further...and most of us need that opportunity. In fact this is the stage where professionals spend most of their time and effort.

You may well have heard about a software package called Photo Shop but to my mind that software is way beyond what is required by most alpaca farmers. Your digital camera may well have come with a software disk and if this does everything you need then that's great. If not I recommend an inexpensive and easy to use package called ACD See. The Pro version is $129 and money well spent. Here is an example of why:





As you can see I have removed what I call the visual distractions, the houses, fences other alpacas and so forth, then cropped the photo so that the alpaca occupies the full picture. This took me about 15 minutes or so from beginning to end, time well spent. In fact I actually enjoy doing this stuff now I know the software and what it can do.

The final piece is that every alpaca image on your web site has Alt Text associated with it and you need to make sure every image on your site is correctly labelled so a clear and unique description is required.

For example calling every image - alpaca - or labelling them - 34562.jpg - is no good.

What you need is - Flossy a friendly alpaca - or something similar. The word alpaca needs to be in there and ithe decsription must be unique.