Taming Images with Windows Live Writer

A number of garden bloggers have recently discovered Windows Live Writer as a blogging tool (see Drafting Blog Posts with Windows Live Writer). Live Writer is not a blog hosting site (like WordPress or Blogger), but is a software package to help you communicate with your blog hosting site. Most of the time, Windows Live Writer does a good job of acting as a communication intermediary, but sometimes something gets lost in the translation.

One place that I find the communication most likely to break down is in the manipulation of images, so this post will focus on some tips for using Live Writer to tame image problems.

There are a number of different ways that you can insert an image into a Live Writer draft:

• You can use the “Insert” menu at the top of the page,
• You can use the picture icon or the insert menu on the toolbar above the editing screen,
• or you can click on the picture icon in the taskpane to the right of the editing screen.

It doesn’t matter which one you use; they’ll all get you to the same place.

Whenever you insert an image or click on one that has already been inserted, the picture taskpane will open. This includes a number of useful tools. Note that there are three tabs at the top of the picture taskpane. I am going to focus here on the Picture tab (top right image) and the Advanced tab (lower right).   The Picture tab allows you to choose how you want your image to be aligned in relation to the surrounding text, whether you want margins around your image, what kind of border you want your image to have, and what you want to happen if someone clicks on the image. The defaults are an inline image (left justified with text above and/or below), no margins, no borders, and clicking to enlarge the image; but you can change these. It is possible to center your image or to wrap text to the right or to the left (as I am doing here). I also like to but a margin of 5-10 pixels between the image and any adjacent text. There are lots of choices for type of border, and you can set your image so that clicking on it links to a website.

Now let’s turn to the Advanced tab. The top part of this taskpane screen allows you to adjust the size of your image on the page, but I find it much easier to do that by clicking and dragging the edges of the image.   I want to call your attention to the actions available on this tab. You can rotate your image, adjust the contrast, crop the image, tilt it, or add a watermark. The latter allows you to put text on the image – a copyright mark, or the name of the image owner, or a caption.   My favorite way to add a caption to an image, however, is the Alternate text box at the bottom of this taskpane screen. Whatever you type in this box will appear when a viewer holds the cursor over the image. (Try it with the images to the right.)

As long as all you want to do is put images inline or centered, this is probably all you need to know. If you have trouble with text bleeding into your images, try using margins above and below your image, or put a paragraph break before and after the image.

If, however, you want to wrap text to the right or left of the image, or if you want to place two images side-by-side, or if you want to put captions beside your images, it will help to learn how to use tables in Live Writer, because tables fix images or text to the page so that they can’t move around.

There are as many different ways to insert a table as to insert an image: (1) the Insert menu at the top of the page, (2) the table icon or insert menu in the toolbar above the editing screen, or (3)the table icon in the taskpane to the right of the editing screen. And, once again, it doesn’t matter which one you use because they’ll all get you to the same place – the Insert Table dialog box (seen here).

This is where you choose how many rows and columns you want in your table. (If I wanted to place two images side-by-side, I’d choose 1 row and 2 columns). You can set the overall width of your table here, but you can also adjust this by clicking and dragging the borders of the table, which I find easier. This box also allows you to choose whether or not you want the borders of your table to show in your final published post (either way, you’ll be able to see them in the editing screen), how much space you want between the contents of a cell and the boundaries of that cell (padding), and how much space you want between cells. When you’ve made your choices, click "Insert,” but please know that you can change your mind about any of these choices after the fact. Anytime you have your cursor placed inside a table, you can access the Table menu, either by clicking on Table at the top of the page or by clicking on the table icon on the toolbar. If you click on “Table Properties” in this menu, it will get you to a screen almost identical to the Insert Table dialog box. I’m not going to go into the other choices in this menu here; if you start using tables, play around with the options in the Table menu to see what they do.

Okay, let’s look at a couple of examples:

In my December Skies, photo essay, I wanted to have photos offset on different sides of the page with a small amount of text next to each. I could make this look the way I wanted in Live Writer by using lots of extra paragraph breaks to space the text out; but when I uploaded to WordPress, it “helpfully” eliminated all the extra paragraph breaks, jumbling the text and images together. Below you can see my solution.

With the barest hint of rose at dawn,

… and the soft glow of treetops in the slanted rays of the morning sun,

…two 1-row x 2-column tables, placed one below the other, with the image in one cell of the table and the text in the other cell. (In the original post, the table borders did not show, but I’ve made them visible here so you can see how it was done.)

Now scroll up and look at the collage of my favorite daylilies at the top of this post. This was done by creating a 3×3 table (below) and then inserting an image into each cell of the table.

Normally, I wouldn’t bother creating a collage in this way. It’s pretty tedious to get the images fitted properly to the cells, and Picasa, which has a greater variety of collage options, produces more polished and professional-looking collages. (If you are not familiar with Picasa, it’s another free downloadable program, this time from Google. Click here.) But there are some things I can do with a Live Writer table that I can’t do in Picasa.

• I’m a Picasa newbie, but as far as I’ve been able to tell, it doesn’t allow you to manually move images around in the collage. You can click “Shuffle Images” to get a different randomly chosen arrangement; but, if I’ve done the math correctly, there are over 362,000 different combinations of nine images. You could spend an awful lot of time clicking “Shuffle Images” before Picasa happened on the arrangement you want!
• I can use a table to create a collage in a shape that Picasa doesn’t offer, as I did in my A Year of Gifts from the Garden post. (Here, I also wanted the images in a specific order, which I couldn’t get from Picasa.)
• If I create my collage using a table, I can put a caption on each image (just hold your cursor over each in the collage above to see the name of the daylily variety), and you can also click on each image to see a larger version of it.
• If I wanted to, I could actually add a caption below each image (as I did on the calendar post). This would be a simple matter of using the Table menu to insert another row for text beneath each row of images.

I know that this is a ridiculously long post with a lot of information to take in. But as you use these various tools, you will become comfortable with them – and pretty soon, you’ll have those unruly images doing exactly what you want!