CMD allows you to define pictures for both families and individuals, and they may be viewed or printed in any of several reports. However, each report prints pictures in roughly the same size, and always in exact proportions.

Because of the potential to quickly use up large amounts of disk space for picture files, and because the pictures will look best when printed if they are of uniform size and proportion, we are providing the following specifications for your pictures.

Ignore them at your peril. In our own testing, we’ve discovered that pictures of large file size can overrun CMD’s internal buffers and create errors. Some of the output forms cannot stretch pictures to maintain their original aspect ratio.

The bottom line is, define the pictures according to our specs here and you should not have trouble viewing and printing the pictures in your data file. It will be difficult to debug problems you may have if you do not adhere to our specs.

Dimensions and Proportion

•All CMD pictures should resolve to a 2 x 2.4 (h x w) dimension. If you wish to make sure there is adequate detail, you may wish to crop the pictures slightly larger, but in the same aspect ratio. For example, 2.5 x 3 or 3.33 x 4 would also work. In our testing, we could not see any difference in pictures saved larger than 2.5 x 3.

•If you cannot crop a picture to these exact dimensions, crop the picture so that it looks best, and then create a canvas size for the picture based on the exact dimension size we recommend, and use white as the color of the canvas. Think of the canvas in this context as the electronic equivalent of a paper cut to the dimensions the picture should be with the picture pasted on it.

Creating a canvas of the picture dimensions will have the net effect of making the pictures look perfectly proportional when printed on the page (because they will be printed based on the canvas size - thus CMD will see the canvas as the full image size in correct proportion, so the picture itself will not be stretched out of proportion). Since you generally use white paper, the canvas itself will be invisible on the printed form. The canvas size is easily adjusted using image editing software.

•Use 200 or 250 ppi for the resolution.

•Use JPeg format images.

•Name the picture file with the family's or individual's name so that you can find it easily when you are ready to link a picture to a family or individual.

You will need to handle all photo editing chores in photo editing software. It will be up to you to edit them so that they all have a similar brightness and contrast, and that each picture (or picture on an underlying canvas) is saved in the proportions set out above.

While this should not be construed as a product recommendation, Adobe PhotoShop Elements is able to handle all of the above functions with a reasonable price tag. Other products such as ULead’s PhotoImpact or Corel Paint should work as well.

Location for Pictures

You will need to store all of your pictures in the same folder for CMD's use before they are actually imported. If you need to change your path, do so using the Configuration Update dialog.