How Do I Bring In My Own Photos To SL?

I would like to take on of my own personal photos and transfer it to my home in SL, mount it over my fireplace.

How would I go about doing this? I'm concerned about the resolution. Pretty sure it will loose something in the translation, but am willing to give it a sho (no pun intended)t, since the picture is so perfect for display over the mantle

Thanks!

Well you could try and save them as targa files and then upload them, it will cost you L$10 to upload each one so start with one and see how it looks inworld.

Resize the images to 512x512 if it's a showpiece photo or 256x256 if it's a smaller photo on the wall. You do not need to crop it square, but squish it to those sizes. Although SL will squish it for you if you want, DOing it yourself gives you more control, if your original picture was say 640x48o, SL witll squish it to 512x256 and lose detail. Or it'll squish it to 1kx1k if it's a large picture and that's too big, it'll take a long time to load.

You can upload jpgs, SL recompresses them pretty small, a normal jpg looks as good as an uncompressed tga file after SL is done mangling it

Then "File"->"Upload Image", then create a box, squish it flat and size it back to the proper aspect of the picture (Wider than tall or whatever) and then drag the image on to the front of the box from your inventory.

Targa files are called TGA files. So you click on your photos and 'save as' ******. TGA file. Then once in world you click on your file menu and then upload texture. Find the photo(s) you want to upload et voila!

You can then place them on a prim (flattened box) and hang them.

I have a framed prim I used to send posters to someone. IM me in world if you'd like one.

Very easy to make though.

You don't have to change it to a targa.. not sure why it's being said. You can upload targas, bitmaps, jpegs, and I believe jpeg 2000s. (That may not be all types, not sure).

Targa is only necessary if it has an alpha channel for transparency.

The short and basic answer is to simply go the "file" on the UI when in world and click on "upload image". Navigate to where you have your picture saved on you computer and click "upload". It will cost you $L10 for each file you upload. They will wind up in your texture folder in your inventory.

However depending on the resolution of your pictures you will probably get some distortion due to the way SL resizes the images for uploading. SL always uses the "power of 2" to size images (examples: 512 x 512, 512 x256, 256 x 512, etc.). Rather than let SL do it (which is rather sloppy at best), it's best to resize (or crop the image) to those powers before you upload. Also SL does a compression on images which introduces loss of detail so if you can, after resizing your pictures, save to a lossless format such as tga, png, etc to avoid at least one compression cycle. If you want your image to have as much detail as possible you can upload at higher resolutions though the gain in quality is really minimal unless you zoom very close to the image to view it in world. I wouldn't go any higher than 1024 as the highest deminsion. But remember to observe the powers of 2 aspic ratios.

When placing your picture over your mantal simply rezz a cube, flatten it to about .10 meters in thickness and size the other diminsions to the size you want your picture to be. As long as you maintain the powers of two the sizing is easy.........just double the shortest diminsion for the longest (2 meters by 1 meter for example). You can upload images using typical computer aspic ratios too........but the images will be distorted when you look at them as a texture. But when applied to a prim you can get rid of the distortion by sizing the prim to the proper aspic ratio. An example that is easy to explain is the 800 by 600 resolution of an older monitor.......that's a 4 to 3 ratio. Make a prim using that ratio and the distortion of the texture will be eliminated. 1280 by 1024 is 5 to 4 ratio, etc. It's easiest to get the prim approximately correct then put your cam directly centered in front of the prim and change the sizes of one diminsion until it looks undistorted to your eye. Surprising how accurate your eye is.

Hope I 've helped a little.

Clever dick (not literally of course).

I guess uploading as TGAs is just a habit. Yoiu lose less resolution, on textures at least.

That's true that if your image contains an alpha channel (transparency) you must use a format that supports alpha channels (png does it too). But I think most are suggesting tga because it's lossless. Bmp, png are also lossless. But jpg is not. To maintain as much detail as possible use a lossless format. It is much better than jpg.

Thanks everyone. Guess I'll have to play around with it a bit but I'm willing to do so and don't even care if I lose money doing so. The photo, according to a photographer friend of mine, is so good I could sell it. So, I really do want to make sure that I get it right. He had suggested resizing it differently from how it was shot also, he wanted me to elongate it, take off some of the sky and make it more linear as he thinks it will be more dramatic that way.

Again, lots of good suggestions, I'm a bit "mathematically challenged" but I think I'll be able to figure it out

Targa is better quality than Jpeg, I'll give you bitmap as a good alternative though