Submitting Photos of Your Art to Artist Calls

I have stressed as professional artists that we all need to have high quality professional images of our work. I use a professional photographer who is well known in the Washington, DC area. However, since you may be provided multiple file sizes by your photographer (a small image for email/websites, a medium sized image around 1-4 MB and a larger Tiff file) you will need to now how to read image sizes for your photos. Most artist calls are not very forgiving if you do not submit photos to their specifications. And artist calls do not have uniform rules for naming your files (i.e. artist name, title, etc.) or the size requested. I have spent many hours adjusting images and renaming photos for various artist calls since you only get one chance.

So how do you know the size and resolution of your photos? If you have an image of your work, right click under properties and you should see both a resolution size (for example 1200 x 800) and the overall size of the file (1.2 MB, etc). Sometimes you can also hover your cursor over the photo and see the same information.

Various email programs like AOL have a maximum total of MBs that you can send as attachments to one email. Some email programs like Yahoo can also compress the size of your attached photos that you send resulting in a smaller sized received than you intended. And if you insert photos into an email versus sending them as attachments, they are almost always downsized to smaller images.

Experiment in sending photos to yourself and friends to determine how your email program functions in this area. This practice will save you a lot of time later on when you are under deadlines for photo submissions.