Making pictures for the web
they have to be
smaller
Have you read the page about file sizes?
Digital images are made up of lots of little colored dots, called pixels. If you get a picture from a modern digital camera it will contain millions of pixels. These images will print at high quality, even at large print sizes.
Here is just a detail from such a digital photograph.
The original picture from which this detail comes is
- 3072 pixels wide
- 2048 pixels high
It will print out on a 400dpi (dots per inch) inkjet printer at 19.5cm x 13cm . But on a computer screen, which typically only packs in 72 dots per inch, the picture seems vast and cannot be seen all at once. The picture takes up 1.55Mb of disk space. At this size it will take 4 minutes to download over a 56k modem and be way too big for your web page.
Here is the whole picture reduced to 975 x 650 pixels, less than a third of the original size. This picture opens in a new window - see how long it takes to load and how much of your screen it takes up.
Finally, here is the whole picture 
reduced to 461 x 307 pixels, just 15% of it's original size - it should look fine on this page:
If you expect to wrap text around the picture then you will probably need to make it even smaller than this: in Cnn.com articles, pictures are typically 220 x 168 pixels, whilst news.bbc.co.uk uses 200 x 150 pixels or smaller - that's the size of the photo of the hand at the top of this page.
How to make images smaller
To make images smaller you need an image editor. If you have a digital camera it probably came with some image editng software. Professionals use Adobe Photoshop. If your budget won't run to that you can try Photoshop Elements or download the open source program the gimp for free - it has almost as many features as Photoshop and some people find it easier to use.
Most of what you'll need to do you can do with a much smaller and simpler image editor.
Try Irfanview - which you can also download for free. It is much easier to use, fast to download, fast to load.