You might have spotted a new button appear in the College CMS website editor – this is the new image cropping tool we mentioned in a blog post last week. I’m delighted to confirm that this went live on Friday, so those of you using the College CMS now have access to a new tool to help you add images to your pages.
The new cropping tool will enable you to easily upload pictures, crop them to the size you want and add them to your pages using the correct layout and accessibility code. The tool also optimises your pictures for the web so that your pages render quickly and don’t contain massive images. Detailed instructions on how to use the tool, including a demo video, are available in the Web Guide FAQs site, together with information about the different image types you can create. If you have any questions about how to use the tool, please contact the Service Desk.
Don’t forget to visit the College’s online image library to search thousands of pictures of the campuses, student life and academic research. These are available to all College staff and students to download at no cost.
As we said last week, this is the first in a series of editor improvements we are working on. We hope you find it helpful and would love to know what you think – do leave us a comment.
It looks like a useful tool
Dear Paul (and others who might encounter the same problem),
The image crop tool will not allow you to reduce the size of an image if the dimension of your crop area is bigger than the image itself. This is done to prevent the creation of “empty” (=Black) pixels in the final image.
If you really want to create an image smaller than the recommended sizes, you can choose the “Free Transform” option which allows you to freely determine the dimension of the crop-area. Please note that this is a “special” option that will just write the image into the Browser window without any CSS. This option should only be used if you know how to add CSS classes yourself or if you need the image in a different context.
As for your IE:
Please have ICT install the latest version of Flash Player on your system. The tool was published for Player 9, the latest version is 10.
Hope that helps,
Karsten
And I’d just begun to master Fireworks!!
Had a few issues with the slider myself, but all in all, it will save a great deal of time.
Currently causing problems in both Firefox and IE for me unfortunately. In IE it won’t work at all, in Firefox the image slider malfunctions.