1.1 Click the icon below to download Irfanview. The download size is 879Kb, and so should take just a few minutes. (for more information on this program visit www.irfanview.com)

1.2 When the file has downloaded, double click on it (the file is called iview397.exe) and follow the on-screen installation steps.

1.3 Once installed, double click the Irfanview icon (similar to the one above) to launch the program.

Open your image with Irfanview

In Irfanview, select File -> Open from the menu, and browse your computer for the image you want to use (Figure 1). Irfanview can open a wide range of image formats, and so your original image doesn't necessarily have to be a JPEG.

Figure 1: Opening an image

Here, we are going to prepare an digital photograph of a blue flower saved on the computer as a JPEG image. The image is 1700 pixels across and 1114 pixels high.

Resize and crop your image

This is the tricky part. Here you create the image you want to use on the front of your Flash GiT cards by making your image smaller (resizing) and cutting out only the parts of the image that you wish to keep (cropping).

As mentioned above, there are only two image sizes you can upload; a Regular Quality size and a High Quality size. The first step is to see how big these sizes are compared to your image.

3.1 With your image displaying in Irfanview, select "Create custom crop selection" from the Edit Menu.

Tip: You will often get better idea of how the selection box fits over your image by pressing the toolbar icon to zoom out before following the above step.

3.2 In the following window, type the Regular Quality image size or the High Quality image size dimensions into the "Width" and "Height" boxes (highlighted below). In this example, we are using the recommended High Quality image size (1541 pixels wide by 1010 pixels high) because our flower image is fairly large.

Figure 2: Defining a cropping region of the GiT cards High Quality size

3.3 Click "Apply to Image".

3.4 A selection box appears over your image (Figure 2). This is the part of your image that will appear on the front of your Flash GiT cards. Move the box around by placing the cursor inside, and dragging it whilst right clicking the mouse.

Below, the selection box has been moved to enclose the flower petals of our image.

There are a few things to note at this point:

• Your image must not be smaller than the selection box. If it is, you could try making the selection box smaller, reducing it to the Regular Quality image size (1199 pixels wide by 785 pixels high). Images smaller than the Regular Quality image size should not be used.

• If you want all of your image, but it doesn't all fit within the selection box, then you will first need to resize your image. You can resize your image by selecting Image -> Resize / Resample. First make sure that the "Preserve Aspect Ratio" box is ticked (Figure 4a - this stops the image getting distorted by keeping the image width and height in the same proportion to each other) and then enter either a new width or a new height in the "Set new size" section (Figure 4b).

(a)	(b)
Figure 4 : Image resizing (a) preserving "aspect ratio" (b) entering a new image size

3.5 Once you are happy with the selected region, crop your image by selecting Edit -> Crop selection from the menu.

If you have been 'zoomed out' on your image, it will now flick back to its original size (i.e. look massive) but don't worry.

Save your image as a JPEG

Now your image is the correct size (cropped to either the Regular Quality or High Quality size), it can be saved as a JPEG, and then uploaded on the gitwithme web site.

4.1 From the File menu select "Save"

4.2 Type a name and select a folder in which to save your image. Make sure the "Save As Type" box says "JPG - JPEG Files"

4.3 Before pressing "Save", click on the "JPEG/GIF save options" box to the right of the "Save ..." window (Figure 5). If you cannot see this window, tick the "Show options dialog" checkbox at the bottom of the Save window.

Figure 5: Changing the quality of your saved JPEG image

4.4 Press "Save". The image is now ready to upload on the gitwithme web site. Good look!

Figure 6: Flower image successfully uploaded to the gitwithme.biz site