Basic: Preparing Digital Photos for publication

If digital photos are properly prepared:

Email will be quicker for you to send and for the receiver to download.
Powerpoint Presentations, Publisher and Word documents will be faster to save and take up less disk space.
Web Albums and Web Pages will load more quickly.

Preparing Photos for publication involves some or all of the following:

Crop – trim unwanted areas from around the main subject of the photo.
Re-size – change the full-size view of the photo to the dimensions you require in your publication.
Optimise – change the file-size of the photo on disk by using file compression to the optimum: minimum file-size for acceptable quality.

Some good Strategies:
If you ever need to re-work a photo start again from the original. You will get a better result than re-editing a compressed image.
Save changed photos with only a slightly different filename. As a result:

The original remains unchanged and can be used again in a different way.
You know which is the original and which is the optimised image.

Examples of filenames:
guitar - original
guitaro – optimised
guitarto - optimised thumbnail (small size)
guitarao - optimised and adjusted (ie large crop or major re-size)