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Displaying photos for politicians is a two step process: 1) research and collect the photo, and 2) edit and upload the photo. The second step includes some image manipulation (so the images display similarly and consistently throughout our website) and uploading it so it can be displayed. Below are some step by step instructions for these processes.
Note: Do NOT use the "upload" option on a politician's biographical tab in admin. It does not work. We upload our photos to our network drive on NextCloud.
Collecting Photos
Whenever you are completing research for a politician (both a candidate or an official), we want to collect and upload a new photo. The current photo may already be up to date, but we want to keep our photo records as recent and up-to-date as possible. ALWAYS collect a photo for every politician you research.
- Look for an official's photo on their office and/or candidate website; ideally, a professional photo limited to their head and shoulders. If this isn't available, look at their Facebook, Twitter, and, in some cases, LinkedIn. It is best to follow this order since websites and Facebook are more likely to have more photos than the rest.
- When choosing a photo, keep in mind that we want to see their face, but we do not want to have to crop out their hair, foreheads, or chins.
- Before saving a photo, make sure the image is bigger than 140 x 140 pixels. You can do this by right-clicking on the photo and choosing 'Inspect.' Hover over the photo and at the top/bottom corner, the size of the photo should appear. A side bar will also appear at this time with a highlighted blue section. If you hover over that section, you can also see the pixels of the photo.
- As a rule of thumb, I usually look for photos that are at least 200 x 200. I will only take smaller photos if there are no other options.
- After cropping, photos must be a minimum of 140 x 140 pixels to make it to the next step. So when a candidate gives you a photo, please be sure it's at least 150 x 150 (the lowest is 140 x 140, but try to get something bigger). If you don't know what the size of the photo is, right click the image and then click on "properties and choose "Image."
- Some photos, once cropped to size, will be blurry/pixelated because they had to be sized up to fit our size parameters. If this is the case, use your best judgment to decide if the photo is good enough to at least distinguish what the candidate looks like.
- If there is a photo on the official's page, right click it, and select "Save Image As."
- If this option does not show up, it is likely the photo is not saveable from that site. It might be best to see if you can find the same picture on another one of their sites.
- If you do get this option and start saving the image, make sure the format isn't '.html'. If this is the case, you aren't saving the photo, you are saving the entire website. This is also an indication that the photo isn't saveable from that particular site.
- The only photo format our process accepts is '.jpg'.
- The file name should be the Candidate ID number from Admin. If you save a picture with more than one person in it, please indicate which person to keep.
- Save it to: Research Drive-->Photos-->Incoming (to be edited), or on your own personal device in a file ready for editing/import.
We can only accept photos that are in .jpg file format. If you find one in another format, you can save it under one of the accepted formats or just find another photo before editing that is a .jpg. Photos saved in the Cropped folder as '.jpeg,' '.png,' '.html,' '.gif,' or any similar extension will not be uploaded to the site.
Editing Photos
For a while we would use jpegview for our editing process. Recently (as of writing, 2023) we switched over to Pixlr.com. The following is how you can edit photos on Pixlr, either on the office computers or on your own personal device. It is quite easy, but if you have any issues you can go to the Elections Director who manages our Pixlr account.
No need to download Pixlr, it’s all online
- Once on the page, click “Start Design Project” under “Pixlr X”
- From here, you can edit your photo in multiple ways:
- Download the image: Click “Open Image” and it will open the pictures folder (or wherever you store pictures). Just click the file you want to edit and it’ll load.
- Use the image url: Click “Load url” and enter in the image url.
- Once you’ve chosen your photo, you might be asked to resize the image (if it’s too big). It shouldn’t matter which resolution you choose.
- When the image loads on the page, go to the “crop & rotate” tool on the left-hand side (it’s the sixth tool down) and click on that. A window will pop up on the side with the width and height dimensions, as well as options to straighten the image, rotate or flip it, and a tool to change the aspect ratio. For this, you should only need to edit the width and height.
- For Vote Smart images, our website will only accept perfect square images, and in Pixlr there are a couple of ways to do this:
- Change the numbers in the “width” and “height” fields
- Drag the sides and corners of the images until the numbers in the above fields match up.
- Once you feel comfortable with your perfect square of the candidate or official, click the blue “save” button on the bottom right-hand side.
- A window will pop up to choose the type of image you want to save as. Choose “JPG” and choose high quality. Then click “save as.”
- Photo name should be the candidate ID.
- Next, go to https://files.votesmart.io/apps/files/?dir=/research/Photos/Cropped&fileid=21744942 and click the “+” button to directly upload your edited photo to our drive. After that, it should take up to a week for the photo to be fully uploaded to the Vote Smart website.
- If you have any questions, ask your direct supervisor for assistance.
Photo Uploads
- All photos ready to be uploaded should be saved in the correct location: Desktop > Research > Photos > Cropped, making sure the photo is in .jpg format.
- Every Monday and Friday evening, the Photo Scraper will upload all photos from this folder to the correct candidate ID outlined by the photo description.
- Expect to see the photo reflected live on the website in around a 48 hour window . This is reflective of the time for the website cache to be cleared, which allows newly uploaded photos to be displayed on the appropriate candidate’s page. (See Mantis ticket #9151 for more information on this process)
- If photos are not displaying on the website after the 48 hr window, create a mantis ticket (See Mantis ticket #9217), and contact the IT Department to address this issue. If it is an urgent, high profile candidate’s photo, the cache can be cleared to allow the photo to be displayed, but this can cause additional errors on the website, so should be avoided wherever possible.
- Keep this timeline in mind when uploading high profile candidate photos for use in social media, press release purposes.
