Windows Live Writer - Image Fixes

First of all, special thanks to Joe Cheng for his quick reply to my last blog post. I’m impressed that one of the developers on the Windows Live Team found my tiny blog post and offered help with my problem in less than 24 hours since it was published. Talk about great service!

Below is an image taken with the same program and settings as before, with the tweaked Windows Live Writer settings.

This screencapture was taken with the same program (Gadwin PrintScreen) using the same settings. The image is being saved as a GIF file. Taking a closer look at the options in the image properties sidebar of Windows Live Writer, it was originally set to use a dropshadow as the border by default. Changing this setting to “None” or “Inherit from weblog” immediately changed the quality of the picture. It was evident right away in the Windows Live Writer screen and should be evident when published to the blog.

For the sake of curiosity, I’m posting the same picture below with the default settings (using the dropshadow).

Definitely not as sharp. If you are using Windows Live Writer, and are inserting GIF image files, be sure to check the properties and don’t use the drop shadow border. Also, make sure to check the bottom of the image properties sidebar and save the new settings you select as default, to prevent the problem from recurring.

Thanks again Joe, and hopefully this will help out a few others as well!

Cheers,

-Jeff

Blog Image Woes

I’ve been a bit disappointed with the quality of the images that have been posting to my blog. I’ve been taking the pics with Gadwin Printscreen lately. When I view the images on my computer, they look fine. When they appear on the blog, they look terrible. Lately I’ve been using Microsoft Windows Live Writer to post to the blog. It has quite a few neat features that are handy, but I think this program may have been contributing to the problem. When it publishes an image to your blog (with a Blogger account, not sure about WordPress or others) it puts two copies of the image in an album. One copy is normal, good quality while the other is the poor quality image that gets displayed on the blog.

When posting to your blog from the web, uploaded images are also placed in a Picassa album, but this time only a single, good quality image is saved, and there is no second, reduced quality image. Here is a screenshot I just took and posted using the web interface.

I have no idea why Windows Live Writer is creating two images and selecting the lower quality image to be included in the blog post, but it is very annoying. I’ve tinkered around with the program looking for a option or setting to adjust but could not find one.

The end result is that I now know how to get better quality images on my blog, and will be uninstalling Windows Live Writer as soon as I’m finished with this post. Edit 1-24-08: Thanks to some quick help from Joe (see comments) this issue has been resolved! Check out the comments below and my next post for more details on what the problem was and how to fix it!

Gadwin PrintScreen

I’m trying out another screencapture utility, Gadwin PrintScreen. It runs on Windows and is freeware.

You can download the program from download.com here.

The main thing that I like when compared to my other favorite program in this category, ScreenHunter, is that Gadwin Printscreen has more options and is a bit more configurable.

Specifically, the program allows you to save in several different file formats such as jpeg, gif, png, tiff and bmp. There are plenty of other customizations as well. You also have the option of previewing all of your screencaps in a popup window before saving, letting you judge whether you got the job done right or wish to tweak it a bit.

Images can be taken from the current window, client window, full scree or a selected rectangular area. The program lurks in the system tray when running, and tiny instruction bubbles pop up to remind you of what to press and click to get your image.

One interesting quirk is that the program can’t take a picture of itself. The key to start capturing won’t work when the option screen is up.

If you’re looking for an alternative to the Print Scrn button on your computer, Gadwin’s PrintScreen utility is a nice freeware alternative.