Why follow these conventions?

These specs have been developed with the goal of keeping our hundreds of timeline photos organized so we can continue to easily add to and maintain our timeline in the future, even if the timeline technology changes or staff members turn over. Photos being as small as possible without losing quality keeps our storage costs down and the page loading faster. Using consistent filenames makes them readable in links, URLs, and more easily findable in our storage system.

Organization

Put images in their dated era folder, found at https://www.overlake.org/imce in images > timeline

• Foreground images go in the images subfolder
• Background images go in the backgrounds subfolder

Size

• No bigger than 2000px in either dimension
• In Photoshop, use Save for Web command to save the image as a copy
•  Settings
  • Quality 50
  • Resize during Save for Web if needed

Format

• .jpg

Naming conventions

Examples

<year>-short-descriptive-title.jpg

• 2010s-canvas-testing.jpg
• 2012-winter-banquet.jpg
• 1991-head-of-school-on-scooter.jpg

Date comes first

If photo is not from a specific year, put the decade with an s, i.e. "2010s"

Allowed characters

After the date, titles should be all lowercase words separated by hyphens/dashes

Allowed characters

• Lowercase letters
• Numbers
• Hyphens/dashes

Disallowed characters

• Spaces
• Underscores
• Capital letters
• Special characters

How to pick a title

Title describes in a few words what the image is showing. If two images would have the same title, add another word to one or both that differentiates them.

Do not prepend or post-pend images with extra text

• No numbers used to differentiate images, i.e. photo-1.jpg, photo (1).jpg, photo-two.jpg, photo three.jpg, etc.
• No extra process words like "Cropped" "Resized" "Original" "Final" "Box 1", etc.
• All the photo title needs to convey is when it was taken and what it is showing, not what's been done to it behind the scenes