I'm not sure how many of you are Mac users, but there's been a request to provide some information on how to properly resize photos for optimum display on Photographica.  I volunteered to tackle this assignment on the Mac side.  For now I'm just going to deal with the resizing issue.  Perhaps someone else will take on the file format topic.

If you need help on doing this and you're using a Mac, I figure you're not into Photoshop in a big way, so I'm going to tell you how to do it in iPhoto.  I've used screen captures to show you how to do this.

First you want to select photo(s) that you want to export and then choose the Export command from the Share menu.  A dialog box pops up. Make sure that the File Export button is selected at the top.  Select "JPG" from the Format dropdown menu.  Click the radio button that says "Scale images no larger than:" and then set the width at something like 800 or 900 pixels.  The height will scale automatically.  Hit the Export button.  Next you'll see the Save As window. All you need to do there is name the file and choose where you want it saved.  After that you can upload the image to Photographica in whatever method you use (Web or FTP).  One thing to be sure of is to select the option that says Do not resize these images automatically. Otherwise your picture may come out fuzzy once uploaded.

So here is the resulting resized photo.

I will say one thing about jpeg files.  To get their smaller size, a lossy compression formula is used, which means that information is thrown away.  Everytime you edit and save a jpeg file information is tossed.  If you do it too many times you wind up with weird jpeg artifacts, which look like splotches of color.  The trick is to always make a copy of the original if you're going to edit a file, jpeg or not.  Then you've always got the original to go back to.  Another trick is that if you've done a lot of editing on a jpeg file, save it as a TIFF file, which does not use lossy compression.