How can you incorporate images from web pages into reports or presentations?

Images on the Internet come in a variety of digital formats. Recent versions of the major browsers provide built-in software to display most of these formats automatically when the images are embedded in web pages. If you want to download these images (after making sure you are observing copyright laws) and incorporate them in your report (with appropriate citation of the source), you need to know some basic information about digital image formats.

Basic Information

• Formats
• The most common formats for images on the Internet are .gif (pronounced "gif" as in "gift" or sometime "jif" as in "jiffy") and .jpg or .jpeg (both pronounced "jay-peg"). Files in the .gif format have a .gif attached to the file name, as in image.gif. Files in the .jpeg format have either .jpg or .jpeg attached, as in image.jpg or image.jpeg.
  


• Copyright
• If you are confident that you can legally copy an image in one of these formats on the Internet, you can download the file to your computer's hard drive (or to a floppy or other diskette) and then insert it into a word processing or presentation software program.
  


• Whole image but no more than 5 by 1 artist or photographer
  • 10% or 15 images (whichever is less) single published work.
    
  
  
• Web Page Construction
• Before you can do this, you need to know a little about how web pages are constructed. A web page that includes an image typically consists of a main page written in html and at least one additional file that contains the image that is displayed in the page. This typical organization means that when you use the "save" or "save as" commands in your browser, only the main html page is saved. The image file is usually not saved automatically. If you use a browser to open the page you saved on your hard drive in this way, the text will be displayed but the images will not.

Saving Files

• To save images files so you can use them in other documents, you need to use special software or special browser commands to save the image rather than (or in addition to) the main html page. There are several commercial software programs that allow you to download images. These programs allow you to save main pages, images, and other constituent parts of web pages such as sound files and the like.
  


• You can also save images files by using a special feature of the Internet Explorer browser in versions starting with IE 5.0. To save an image file using Internet Explorer:
  


1. First load the page with the image into your browser.


2. Now click on the File menu and select the "Save as..." item.


3. When the dialog box appears, click on the pull down menu following the "Save as type:" line.


4. Select the "Web Page, complete (*htm, *html)" option.


5. When you click the "Save" button, the main web page along with all the files necessary for it to display properly will be downloaded to your disk.

If you navigate to the directory where you instructed the browser to save the page, you will see an html file with the name you selected for the saved file. You will also find a new folder with the same name as the html file. In that folder are stored the image and other files. Open that folder and look for files with the .gif or .jpg endings. There is no way to know exactly what name was given to the image file you want to use. You'll have to use trial and error to find it. Just click on the various .gif or .jpg files. They will open in your browser or perhaps another graphic display program, depending upon how your computer is configured. Once you have found an image file you want, You can simply copy and paste it into a word processing program or into a presentation program. See our citations page for instructions on how to give credit to the author or source of the image file.

Authored by Lora K. Kaisler 2003