If you want to manage a website, publish an e-newsletter or participate in social media, you need to know how to prep photos. The good news is, you don’t need Photoshop and you don’t have to spend a dime on photo editing software.

The tool that I recommend to beginners is Picnik, a free online photo editing service. It’s super easy and browser-based, which means you don’t need to download software. You can edit photos from any computer connected to the Internet.

Picnik is the official photo editing tool for Flickr and Picasa (photo sharing sites) and MailChimp (email service provider), among others. Google thought it was so nifty it purchased Picnik in March 2010.

Before going into Picnik as a tool, we need to cover a few techniques.

Make Your Photos Light

Photos taken from digital cameras are usually too fat to be used online. If you see “mb” (megabytes) as the file size, it’s way too big. You want “kb” (kilobytes), preferably something under 100kb. The fatter the file, the slower your web page or newsletter will load. A lot of readers will just move on.

Save Your Photos Right

Save your photos as .jpg or .png, and for graphics with limited colors, such as logos, use a .gif.

Get To Know Pixels

Pixels are the smallest unit of a picture on a screen. You measure height and width of digital photos in pixels.

For websites and email, you will need to resize photos so they fit properly on the page or in the column. This column is about 580px wide, so I need to make my photos no wider than that or it’ll make this webpage look funny.

Here’s a photo saved in three different pixel sizes (isn’t she cute):

DIMENSIONS: 580px wide x 440px high

DIMENSIONS: 300px wide x 227px high

DIMENSIONS: 150px wide x 114px high

Social media sites such as Facebook will resize photos for you.

Get Cropping

Learn how to crop properly and a whole world of opportunity will open for you:

• Focus on the most visually interesting sections of a photo
• Get rid of unnecessary or undesirable parts of the photo
• Make thumbnails for previews and excerpts
• Prepare photos for defined spaces, like a homepage slide show (like on my homepage)

For example, I took these photos of a daycare center mural, and really just wanted to zoom in on the boy on the tire swing for the center’s web page:

Tire swing before cropping

Tire swing after cropping

Now Go Picnik!

I highly recommend Getting Started With Picnik, a quick guide designed to get you started on the path to photo-editing awesomeness.

Practice those crops, and then move on to red-eye, filters and overlaying text. Have fun! And, be productive without being frustrated.