Media Submission Guidelines

Users of this website may upload pictures in various contexts:

Advertisers uploading pictures to accompany marketplace submissions.

Event Attendees uploading pictures to accompany Fashion Show, Fiber Exhibit, or Guild Table submissions.

Vendors uploading pictures of items for sale.

Speakers submitting headshots or class sample photos.

Regardless of your context, please follow the following guidelines.

Intellectual Property Rights

Only upload images for which you have appropriate ownership and distribution rights.

Okay to upload:
Pictures you personally took
Pictures you hired someone to take for you (though some professional photographers may limit your distribution of pictures. If you hired someone to take headshots, for example, you should make sure that your contract with them allows you to distribute the pictures without attribution).

Probably not okay to upload:
Pictures you got from stock photo sites. The licensing on these images varies both within an individual site and from one site to another. We’d really rather you didn’t upload these photos to the FTWG site.

Definitely NOT okay to upload:
Pictures taken by someone other than you that you did not hire to take the pictures.
Images you found on Facebook, Google Search, or anywhere else on the internet.
Pictures of things that are protected by intellectual property law. For example, you cannot take a picture of a page from a book and upload that picture.

The above lists are not exhaustive. The easiest path is to stick to pictures you personally took of things you personally made!

Image Specifications

Images files are often very large, both in the dimensions of the image and in their file sizes. Large images quickly eat up our storage space and they make our website slow to load. In order to keep the FTWG website humming along at a workable rate, the forms on this website will not allow you to upload images that are larger than 1 MB.

FTWG is happy to help those who are already scheduled to speak or vend at an event, should you need assistance with getting images into an appropriate format and size. If you are submitting an inquiry re: vending, a proposal to speak, a marketplace ad, a contact form, a scholarship application, an entry into an exhibit, an event announcement, or any other form that requires a picture, we are not able to assist you with resizing of images. We recommend this article on How to Optimize Images for Web Performance without Losing Quality. It’s a long article; the section on How to Save and Optimize Images for Web Performance is the part you need most. In addition, see the section below on how to use the website Sqoosh to edit your images.

File Size and Type

Files to be uploaded must be no larger than 1 MB.
JPEG (sometimes abbreviated JPG) and PNG are the preferred file formats. We may be able to accept SVG files, under limited circumstances, like a vendor logo.
We do not accept photos in PDF or WebP formats.

Image Dimensions and Quality

Headshots should be 200 pixels by 200 pixels.
We recommend that vendor logos be a minimum of 200 pixels in their smallest dimension.
All other images should be a minimum of 500 pixels in at least one direction and a maximum of 1000 pixels in any direction.

If you use a tool like Photoshop, JPGs optimized to 65% quality generally show no loss of quality when uploaded to the website.

We recommend that you save PNG files with a transparent background before uploading the image.

On Site Compression

This website has the ShortPixel Compression plugin installed. Whenever an image is uploaded to this website, the ShortPixel software automatically compresses the image, saves the new smaller file, and deletes the larger file that was originally uploaded.

Using Sqoosh to Edit Your Images

If you don’t own software that lets you edit images, we recommend using Sqoosh.app.

1. On your computer, create a copy of your picture, and give the copy a different name than the original image. We recommend simply adding ‘resized’ to the end of the file name.
2. Click on the big pink dot on the screen to upload the copy of your image.
2. When your picture loads on the site, you’ll see the image with a gray bar down the center. On the gray bar, there’s a pink arrow pointing to the left and a blue arrow pointing to the right. In the bottom right corner there’s a box labeled EDIT.
3. In the Edit box, toggle the Resize Button to the on position (it is off by default). You now see several settings, including the width and height of your picture. The width and height are linked so that if you change one of them, the other will automatically change to a number that maintains the same proportion as your original image.
4. Your picture should be no more than 500 pixels at its largest dimension. If your width is bigger than your height, change your width to 500. If your height is bigger than your width, change the height to 500.
5. Under the Compression section, you have two settings. First there’s a dropdown menu. Select ‘Browser JPEG’ from this menu. Below the dropdown, there’s a slider labeled ‘Quality.’ Set this slider to 0.65.
6. Below the compression section, you see a bar with three things: a percentage which tells you how much smaller than edited file is than the original that you uploaded, the new file size (if there’s a KB after the number, it’s small enough for you to upload on our website), and a picture of a floppy disk with a down pointing arrow on it. Once you’ve finished your edits, click the picture of the floppy disk to download the edited file. It will be downloaded to your computer, and saved with the same file name.
7. If you have another image to resize, click the back button on your browser to return to the Sqoosh.app home page.

NOTE: the changes you make will be reflected on the right hand side of your screen. It will probably look pixellated. That’s okay. You are viewing the image at a much bigger size than it will be when it is on the FTWG website.

FTWG Use and Editing of Images

Please see the Privacy Policy, Terms of Use, and Media Waivers on this site for information on how the images you upload may be stored and used. In addition to the terms in those documents, please be aware that FTWG may crop your images, include them in a gallery, or otherwise combine them with other images at its discretion in order to suit the purposes of this site.

FTWG will not crop, recolor, or otherwise manipulate vendor logos, though we may present vendor logos at a variety of sizes or combined with other images. For example, we usually prepare one web page to display the logos of all the vendors scheduled for a specific event. The logos on that page may be smaller in dimension than the originally submitted logo, but will not be altered in any other manner.