How To Make Bigger Photos on Blogger

I’ve been wanting to post some tutorials for a while, and I decided that now is the time to do it since I’ve been getting a lot of great questions from my friend & aspiring photographer Nikki Rose.  Thanks Nikki!

Part One in the Photo Blog series: How to get bigger photos on Blogger.

Note: I am not remotely fluent in html (computer code language), and I still figured out how to change the coding to get larger photos. So even if you are completely right-brained, there is still hope! Also note that there are a lot of tutorials out there, so look around. I pieced this process together by google-ing a lot, and by trial and error.

STEP ONE: Make sure you have a Blogger account. It’s super easy, and the basic accounts are free. I highly recommend using their “Minima” template – it’s clean, simple and friendly to people just getting used to html.

STEP TWO: Go to your “Dashboard”, and then to “Layout”. There are 4 tabs under the Layout section: Page Elements, Fonts & Colors, Edit HTML, and Pick New Template. You want to click on “Edit HTML”. Now, before you change anything in the coding, you’ll want to click “Download Full Template” so you have a back-up of the original in case anything happens.

STEP THREE: Scroll down in the HTML gobble until you see the title that says: “Outer Wrapper”. Underneath that there is an “outer-wrapper” section and a “main-wrapper” section. Each of them say “width” underneath, and those are the numbers you need to change. Try setting the Outer Wrapper width to 1200, and the Main Wrapper width to 900. Take advantage of the “Preview” button to see how those changes would affect the layout. If it doesn’t work, just click “Clear Edits” and try a different number. Mine is currently set to 1190 and 900 (because I also changed my sidebar HTML).

You’re done! The next step is getting your pictures up, and you don’t want to use the Blogger Photo-Uploader because it automatically sizes your photos down to the original small-template size (like it did below because I didn’t run these screen shots through my normal process). I will share how to post your images in one of the next entries.

Note: it’s a great idea to create a Test Blog rather than try to make changes to your current blog first.  That way, you can play around and figure out exactly how you want to look, and then you can just copy and paste your changes over to your real blog.  As you get more comfortable with understanding what correlates to what in your HTML, you can play around with other elements of your layout (i.e., I tailored my header, removed the”….” borders from my sidebar, etc.).  Have fun!