How to easily edit photos for Find-A-Grave

Digital cameras are wonderful for taking a lot of pictures fast, but they can create some problems (most often, by being 'sideways' or upside down when uploaded, even when they looked to be correctly oriented when you click on 'upload' on the find-a-grave screen.

You may also want to make minor adjustments to rotation; often, when pointing straight down at a flat marker, your camera may be off a little bit from 'level'. You may also want to crop your pictures, either to get a closer view, or to shrink the file size.

I'm going to show you a really simple program you can use to edit your pictures, and best of all, it's free!

Start by going to irfanview.com. The screen will look like this:

Click on "Download". After you download it an install it, you'll have an icon that looks like this:

When you use this program to open an image, it looks like this:

As you can see, this image is not only sideways, it's a bit far off, and not quite square. These are all easy to fix!

First, to make the image rotate 90 degrees either Right or Left, just press R or L. In this case, I typed "L", it rotated left, and now the image looks like this.

Already much better, but it's off a bit from level. Now we'll fix that. Click on Image, and you get this drop-down menu. (You can also type CTRL-U and skip to the next step, if you like shortcuts.)

Click on Custom/Fine Rotation, and you get this:

In the box under Angle, you want to type a number (and this will take a little practice before you get the image level on your first try); a positive number will turn your image clockwise, and a negative number will turn your image counter-clockwise. On this image, only a slight adjustment is needed, so I type "4" and hit enter.

Now the image looks like this:

You can see that the grave marker is now level, but the photo is askew, and has black areas to fill in the empty area. This is the last thing you'll need to do, and it's the easiest. Just click on the picture in a spot where you want to draw a rectangle to 'crop' out what you want to keep, hold your mouse button down, and drag the cursor to the far corner of the rectangle, and let off the mouse button. This will draw a box around your image, which you can just barely see on this picture.

Now that you have drawn your rectangle, click on Edit, and click on "Crop Selection (Cut Out)" and you'll get your final image like you want. (You can also type CTRL-Y, if you prefer shortcuts.)

Now just save the picture, and upload it to your memorial.

One final note (and you only have to do this the first time you are saving a picture, but it's important!). When you hit the Save button, a menu appears to the right of your image. Be sure to check "Try to save with original JPG quality (estimation). Else, the quality of your photo may be reduced.