Upload Photos

For each step in your guide, you'll add both written instructions and photos demonstrating those instructions. We’ll go over text in Unit 3.

preparing and uploading your pictures

Before adding pictures to your guide, you can use Photoshop or other software to lighten up or crop them so that they look better. However, we have a few guidelines:

  • Please do NOT use Photoshop to remove photo backgrounds. Your backgrounds don’t have to be perfectly white; a nice uncluttered background is less distracting than one that has been crudely cut out. Even if you really, really know what you’re doing, your time is better spent on other parts of the project.

  • Please do NOT use Photoshop to add markup to pictures. Instead, use iFixit's built-in markup tool. This way, anyone can change the markup in case a mistake is made, whereas Photoshopped markup is permanently attached to the picture.

  • Take the picture with the device against a solid white background that is well-lit, with the camera in landscape orientation.

  • Keep your pictures as large as possible in terms of resolution. If a picture is 4000 x 3000 pixels in size, so be it!

  • To upload a photo, add/edit a step and click the camera icon. This brings up your personal media manager, where you can manage your existing photos and upload new ones.

Editing interface of a guide step

CroppING YOUR PICTURES

You should crop each photo so that it:

A correctly cropped photo does not have wasted space or a white border around the image

To crop a photo, go to the step editor and click on the gear icon in the lower right corner of the image. Select “Crop."

Menu showing the button for the "Crop" tool

In the new window that opens, click and drag the corners of the selection box to frame your photo. Once you have your photo in position, click Save.

A Lego lifeguard stands beneath a Lego palm tree

There's no lifeguard on duty.

You don’t want to end up back in the kiddie pool with floaties. Pay careful attention so that your photos don’t have tan lines (improper exposure), sunburns (color cast), or photobombers (messy backgrounds). You’ll save time (and hopefully not have to reshoot) by making sure that your photos are picture-perfect and up to the standards listed on the Unit 2 instructions and checklist. When you’re ready, throw us a line at techwriting[at]ifixit[dot]com, and we’ll let you know when you can boogie board into Unit 3.