Images are a great way to add interest to your site and help convey the message of your department or organizational mission and goals. However, there are lots of questions that come up when adding images including
There are many options to find images of Yale that are free and available for use, providing they promote a department, organizational or institutional purpose.
Once you find the images, you need to be able to manipulate them so they work in your site. The Choosing and Preparing Images For Your Site is a handy guide to help get the right images in the right place.
The most frequently asked question about imagery and websites is “Can I use this photo I found on Google?” In short the answer is NO; that is unless you have permission. Many of the images found on Google or anywhere throughout the web are copyrighted and therefore cannot be used without risk of legal action resulting in heaving fines. Therefore, unless you have explicit written permission to use an image from the photographer, you should NOT use that image.
You can use the WYSIWYG toolbar to upload images that you want to use in the body area of your site.
If you want to have a caption display below your image, you can do so in the following way:
There are times when your images need to be cropped prior to uploading, or you have a series of images that need to be the same size. To ensure the integrity of the photo, you should crop and scale the photo prior to uploading.
While there are lots of software packages that do this, the instructions below demonstrate how to crop an image using Photoshop, which can be purchased through ITS software licensing at a reasonable annual rate.
The Rotating Image Feature requires that images be pre-sized prior to uploading to ensure they are all the same size. Images must be 978px wide but the height can vary. However, the height should be consistent to provide a seamless transition between photos.
A Mixed Content Warning (pictured above) appears when a site’s connection is secure (using https) but the page content itself is not. This is commonly a result of directly referencing an existing image on the site using an absolute url pointing to http, though it can also be caused by hotlinking external images.
Though this warning will not affect the security of sensitive data, these images themselves can still present a small security risk to your site and its users.
When the image causing the Mixed Content Warning is referencing an image that has been uploaded elsewhere on your site, the warning can be fixed by editing the url of the problematic image to be a relative url, rather than an absolute one. This has the secondary benefit of ensuring that the image will continue to work if the site’s base url changes, or when a test or development build is pushed to production.
To edit the image url, begin editing the page containing the image and double-click the image in the text body. Examine the URL field, which will be the first text field from the top. An insecure image will be using a full (absolute) url beginning with “http://” and containing the site’s base url, e.g. “http://yalesites.yale.edu/sites/default/files/images/Screen%20Shot%20201… .”
A relative url will contain everything after the “.edu”, with the format “/sites/default/files/images/filename.jpeg”, as seen in the figure above. To change an absolute url to a relative one, remove everything before “/sites” in the URL field.
Repeat the above instructions for any media not directly uploaded to the page returning the Mixed Content Warning until the warning no longer appears in your browser.
If the problematic images are being hotlinked from an external source, downloading the image and uploading directly to the site will dismiss the warning.