How to post your Alpacas for Sale, Studs for Hire, & Vendor Listings

Click the "User Login" link on the home page. Enter your username and password. (When logging in for the first time, make sure you reset your password to something private under "Contact Information.")

Once logged in, you'll see the "User Area" with links for:

• Update Your Contact Information
• Manage Your Vendor Listing
• Manage Your Alpacas for Sale Listings
• Manage Your Studs for Hire Listings

In each of the management areas, you can either click the "New Entry" link to add a new listing, or--once you've added listings--they'll show up in list format and you can click on an alpaca's name to edit the information, upload a new photo, price, etc. Remember to click the "Save/update" button at the bottom of each page whenever you add entries or make changes.

When you click the Save/update button, you will be given the option to pay via Credit card or Check. If you click pay via Credit Card, you will be taken to the PayPal site where they will securely collect your payment information on MABA's behalf, and your listing will appear immediately. If you pay via Check, your listing will be in the database but will not be activated until we receive your payment.

Recommendations for optimizing and uploading your photos:

In order to control the sizes of files on our server and to reduce download times for dialup viewers, the MABA web site will only accept images for member's alpaca listings that are 250 pixels wide or 40KB (after compression), whichever is less. To achieve these file sizes and maintain excellent quality, use an image editting program to save your images at 72dpi in JPEG format with a quality setting of "40" (out of 100), "4" (out of 10), or "medium"--this will depend on your software. You should also select the "progressive" setting if available in your software to speed the loading of your file and reduce file sizes even further. Using these settings, final images will be well under 40KB--usually in the 12KB to 24KB range.

For the best photos possible, most programs will allow you to crop out surrounding scenery of grass, trees, other alpacas, etc. Look for a tool that resembles the one at right. Crop out the unnecessary parts first, then set your width to 250 pixels. Images other than 250 pixels wide will be scaled to fit our templates. You should also turn off or not embed color profiles which can dramatically increase the size of your file and are not necessary for the web.

If you have any questions, please contact Chris Armstrong or Steve Quigley at info@marylandalpacas.org.

Adobe Photoshop™ recommendations:

• Set your Units under preferences to "pixels"
• Using the crop tool, set your width to 250 px, leave the height field empty, and set your resolution to 72dpi
• Crop your image as desired (drag a marquee around the part you want and double-click to crop)
• Then "Save for web", use a JPEG quality setting of 40 and turn on "progressive"

You should get excellent quality images with these settings that automatically have extraneous data like desktop icons and color profiles stripped out. Your files sizes will be between 12kb and 24kb.

Kodak's EasyShare™ recommendations:

You'll probably find that whatever software you're using, they all are similar. And most programs should be able to output sharp photos that are just around the maximum size limit or much smaller. Here is how to use Kodak's EasyShare for optimizing MABA web images:

• In Kodak's Easyshare (v.6), select "export" or "save as"; either one should give you the same options.
• Choose JPEG as the file format, and for size, choose "specify size".
• The clumsy part here is that it doesn't let you pick "width" or "height," it just uses what you enter as the "largest dimension." So here's where you'll have to experiment a little depending on whether your digital camera takes photos that are 4x6 proportion (2:3 ratio) or 8x10 (2:2.5 ratio); this depends on your camera.
• So before cropping, 2:3 images would have a "scale no larger than" size of 375 pixels; as the height, this will give you a width of 250 pixels.
• For 2:2.5 images, use a "scale no larger than" size of 313 pixels; this will also give you a 250 pixel width.

Apple's iPhoto™ recommendations:

In iPhoto, choose "Export." Select the JPEG format, select "scale images no larger than", and only enter 250 as the width. Leave the height blank and it will scale proportionally.

Saving multiple images by exporting files to a web page:

Never versions of Adobe Photoshop™, Kodak EasyShare™, and Apple iPhoto™ allow you to select multiple photos at one time and then export them all as a web page. In this case, you also can set the width of all photos to 250 pixels. The software will then create a folder that will have an HTML document, a folder with thumbnails, and a folder with all of the images scaled to 250 pixels wide. For MABA purposes, you can trash the HTML and thumbnails. The only problem with both programs, is that they do not give you the option to delete the color profiles that are embedded in the camera files. This unnecessary code doubles the size of these small files, possibly putting them over the maximum size limit. So your results may vary.

Photoshop Elements ($85) is a non-commercial version of Photoshop which should be much easier to use for manipulating and editting photos, and which should let you "Save for Web" or at least turn off color profiles. There are many other shareware options such as GraphicConverter which you can try for free from the web. Please evaluate all software yourself or do your research as to their features before making your purchase.

If you have any questions, please contact Chris Armstrong or Steve Quigley at info@marylandalpacas.org.