College Sports Information Directors of America

By Bob Lowe, Greensboro College SID
Chair, CoSIDA Technology Committee

Greetings from the CoSIDA Technology Committee. Saving your valuable time is what we seek to do! The following five tips should help do just that.

1. Easy Photo Storage

   For some reason, it took me awhile to develop this plan.

   Here are my steps.

   1. Take the pictures (action or head shots). Have your photographer shoot so the jersey numbers are visible for identification. You can always crop later.
   2. Download: let’s assume they were men’s soccer head shots, from camera to CD. The CD will be labeled and then stored in one of those black storage folders with sleeves.
   3. Copy the images to a place on your desktop computer—let’s say “msoccer/2007”
   4. Go to the “msoccer/2007” folder in Internet Explorer. In the “Views” tab at the top, choose the “filmstrip” option.
   5. Right click the photos in the filmstrip within Windows Explorer. Highlight “Rename” and label the files “beckham-david-hs-082507”. This is your easily identified hi-resolution head shot photo to be used in media guides, or to be sent to newspaper.
   6. After very photo has been renamed, copy all the photos and paste to your appropriate website folder.
   7. Use your web management software to place and resize your images. Place the image by browsing to it. A window opens that allows you to resize and then to save to the appropriate folder on your web site. This folder is where you can access low-res images for future use.
   8. BONUS TIP: Have a shared network with personnel in your athletics communications office? Store the hi-res images on a shared network for easy access for all staffers.
2. More Photo Stuff

   I’ve had two instances in the past year where we’ve needed bigger photos than we normally have. Posters and the ever popular wall photos (Fatheads) are becoming more popular. Keep this in mind for specific photo shoots. Your photogs should set their cameras to the highest setting for image size.

3. Photoshop Web Photo Galleries

   Ever have a coach give you a disk of 100 photos and ask to have them put on the web? Me too, and I’ve long been searching for time-saving way of getting photos to the web. The solution came via UNC Wilmington’s Tom Riordan (a CoSIDA Technology committee member) on the SID Board.

   Photoshop’s web galleries are the answer!

   1. Open (file/open) the photos you want in the gallery.
   2. Select file/automate/web photo gallery
   3. A box then opens up. You can choose the style of your album and the destination for the images on your site.
   4. Once the gallery is created, you can then link to that page.
4. No mopeds on the freeway!

   A summer-ending vacation put me back on the dial-up highway for two weeks. Let’s just say my pages are still loading and that’s a road I don’t want to travel again! Wi-fi is more accessible now, but driving around seeking signals is no fun either. With that said, I need to take a closer look at mobile broadband.

   Expect stories on mobile broadband and the following subjects.

   • Adobe’s new CS3 Creative Suite
   • Webcasting
   • Starting your own Blog
   • Using Adobe Illustrator
   • More on web Content management systems

   If this story. If the CoSIDA Technology Committee can be of assistance, please contact us. If there’s a topic you’d like to see covered, please email me at blowe@gborocollege.edu and we’ll see if one of our members can cover the topic.

   Alternatively, we welcome submissions from sport information professionals who are not officially on the committee. Once, again just forward your submission to the email address above.

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