An Easy Way to Make Your Images Larger on Blogger

'Discovering Beauty'            8x10        pastel       ©Karen Margulis

This is an art blog.  The images need to be clear and easy to see.  But this is something that has eluded me.  For some reason my images were small even when I chose the large setting.   It bothered me.  Last year I did some research and discovered a way to change the html code to allow for larger images.  It was an extra step but it worked.

That is until readers told me that this adjusted images didn't show up in their email feed. So I stopped changing the size and tried to be satisfied with the small images.

Then I came across Debora Stewart's wonderful blog.  She does fantastic abstracts and I was excited to see that she has a blog!  If you aren't familiar with her work you can see it here.

When I opened Debora's blog I noticed that her paintings were LARGE!  And she was using Blogger like I am. They looked great!  Hmmmmmm what was I doing wrong?  So I emailed her and she graciously replied that all she was doing was choosing the 'large' option under her images.  Well so was I.  This time I wasn't going to give up.

The answer was SO SIMPLE that I am almost embarrassed to share it. Here is what I did:

• I checked the template I was using. Perhaps the template wasn't allowing me to make the photos larger and this was part of the problem. So I switched my template to 'Simple' . I have used  this template in the past but had to make adjustments to get it to look the way I wanted. This time they had a version that was perfect.  And Blogger lets you preview any changes before you are committed. But this still didn't solve my problem. My images were still too small.

• Then the light bulb went off!  I realized that when I chose the Large and Extra Large setting for photos they bled over the the information on the sidebar.  What if I made the sidebar smaller? So I looked at the available adjustments and there was a slider that quickly adjusted the size of the text boxes and the side bar. And all of the sudden my images were as large as I wanted!  I am thrilled.

And it was so SIMPLE!

Below is a preview of one of the approaches we will be trying in this week's pastel class. Stay tuned for details later in the week.