Great Plains Enterprises - Before and After Photos App

Your Before and Afters App
for iPad™, iPhone™, and iPod touch®

Submitting Photos for your App

This document will give you all the information you require to prepare your photographs for your App.

The document is necessarily technical, best read by your Photoshop person. She should try out the app first, so she is familiar with how the photos are presented on the app.

If you don't want to do any work to prepare your photos for the app, you can just send us the photos you have, and we'll do all the preparation. Our Photoshop team will have additional charges for working with your photos. Read section #10 at the bottom of this document if you want to take advantage of that option.

1. One photo contains both the before AND the after

The app uses photographs that consist of a before and an after, residing in the same image:

So what we see above is one picture, in one image file, containing both the before and the after.

The before and after can be separated slightly, as they are above, or they can be abutted against each other. You can have a thin or thick line between the before and after, of any color, or no line. Your choice.

If your views are much wider than they are tall, such as when showing the mouth or teeth, as below:

then read section #9, at the bottom of this page, for instructions on arranging the before and after to better fill the available screen.

2. The iPad, iPhone, and iPod touch devices

The iPhone and iPod touch have a screen that has dimensions 480 by 320 pixels when in landscape mode:

The photos display largest on the app when in landscape mode, as above. When the device is turned to portrait mode, as below, the app will shrink the photos to fit on the screen:

On the iPad, the screen has dimensions 1024 x 768 pixels in landscape mode:

The photos display largest on the app when in landscape mode, as above. When the device is turned to portrait mode, as below, the app will shrink the photos to fit on the screen:

You don't have to shrink your photos to fit the app; we will shrink them to proper size. You should send photos that are large enough to fill the screen in landscape mode: images that, when the before is joined with the after, are at least 1024 pixels wide or 768 pixels tall. You are welcome to send images that are much larger than that if you wish. Just put the before next to the after in the same image, and we'll take care of shrinking the image to proper size for the app.

If your images are smaller than the iPad can handle, it's probably fine: the iPad can expand photos to fill the screen and keep them looking very natural, and we can still shrink the images to display on the iPhone.

Still, try to send the photos as large as you can. If you have images on your Web site, although the images shown there are much smaller than 1024 x 768, your Photoshop person probably has larger images on a hard disk somewhere.

3. Don't worry about matching the height/width RATIO of the devices

You do not need to crop the images so the ratio of width to height is 3:2, like the screen of the iPhone, or 4:3, as on the iPad. For example, if your image is only 440 pixels wide when shrunk to 320 pixels tall, as below:

... then the image won't fill the entire screen, but will have a black vertical stripe to the left and right of the image. That's not a problem: nobody will notice the stripe, and it won't detract from the photos. It would be too difficult, and unnecessary, to crop every before-and-after photo to exactly a pre-determined width to height ratio.

Similarly, if a photo is much wider than it is tall, as below, then it will show black above and below the photo. Also not a problem:

4. Cropping your images

Follow the same reasonable guidelines you used when preparing your photos to appear on your Web site. Remember that the screen size on the iPhone is limited compared to a computer monitor, so don't show the entire body if you're trying to show a before and after of the torso or breasts, for example.

This is a 480 x 320 pixel image showing two views of the body:

If the views are cropped to show only the area of interest:

...then the views can fill the available screen more effectively, and give a better demonstration of the changes made.

5. Image formats

You may send images in any format: .jpg's, .gif's, .tiff's, .psd's, .png's. We will convert them to a format that the iPad and iPhone can use. If you are sending .jpg's, send them at high quality. More later on how to send the images to us.

6. Identify the procedure that each photo represents

Your table of contents page will list the procedures that the user can select, and we need to know which photos should display under which procedure. For example, if the user can select photos of Rhinoplasty, Face Lift, and Breast Augmentation, we'll need to know which of the photos that you send should show up under the Rhinoplasty category, which under Face Lift, etc. Don't assume that we'll know and can sort them correctly for you.

The easiest way to accomplish this is to make directories for each group of photos, and make the directory names the same as the names of the procedures. So in the media that you send to us (a zip file, or a CD-ROM, for example), you'll have a directory called Rhinoplasty, and the photos in that directory will be the photos that you want to appear when the user touches "Rhinoplasty" in the table of contents.

The files in these directories can have whatever names you wish: you don't have to re-name the files to anything consistent. We will re-name the files to something that the app can use.

7. You may control the order in which the photos appear

Within each directory, you can control the order in which the images will appear. So if the user touches "Breast Augmentation", you can control which image shows up as image #1, which is #2, etc. Ordering the images is optional.

If you have only a few images in a directory, perhaps fewer than five or six, you may write a text document to send us, indicating your preferred order. If there are many images in a directory, and you have a preferred order, you must indicate the order by controlling the name of the image files. For example, if these are the names of the files in your Tummy Tuck directory...

SmithJoanFeb04
Bob Brown 01-23-98
as239948_Jul09

... and you want these images to appear in this exact order, add a prefix to each file name so that the files will sort in your desired order:

001SmithJoanFeb04
002Bob Brown 01-23-98
003as239948_Jul09

You may have even hundreds of images in each procedure, so you can see how naming the images to indicate your desired order will speed the processing of your photos. If you have no preferred order, just don't rename the images and don't send us written instructions on ordering them; they will appear in a semi-random order.

8. Number of photos, and how to send them

There is also no limit on the number of procedures you may have in the table of contents. There shouldn't be any procedures that contain only one photo, and probably a procedure with only two photos might look funny. You could have a category in the table of contents called "Other Procedures" to collect stragglers like that if you wish.

If you have only about 10 photos in total that you wish to put on the entire app, you could have one procedure on the table of contents page, called "Plastic surgery".

You may email the images and accompanying instructions or send them on a burned CD-ROM or DVD, or send them on a USB "thumb" drive, or give us the URL of an online storage site. If you email the images or use online storage, you should use the directory structure mentioned above, and zip up the files, maintaining the directory structure.

9. If your images are much wider than they are tall

If your images are much wider than tall, when you shrink them in width to place them side by side, they will be very short in height:

Each of the before and after images above was shrunk to 235 pixels in width, so that when placed next to each other, plus a 10-pixel spacer, they encompass the 480 width pixels of the iPhone's screen.

For wide images like this, it's better to plan to place the before image above the after image:

Each of the before and after images above was shrunk to 155 pixels in height, so that when placed vertically next to each other, plus a 10-pixel spacer, they encompass the 320 height pixels of the iPhone's screen. You can see how these images fill the screen much more efficiently than when the images were side by side, and it would thus be easier for the user to see the results displayed.

In general, it is worthwhile to place the after image below the before image if the width of the before or after is greater than about 1.6 times its height.

10. Read this section if you want US to prepare your photos for you.

If you use the above guidelines when preparing and submitting your photos for your app, there is no charge for the work we do to incorporate your photos into your app.

If you wish, we can do the work of taking your separate before and after photos and putting them into the format we require: the before and the after next to each other in one image, as described in point #1 at the top of this page. If we do the work, there will be an additional charge to process your photographs:

If the separate befores and afters are already cropped and the same size, and we only need to join them, the charge is $3.50 per before/after pair. This is probably the situation if your befores and afters are on your Web site as separate photo files.

If the separate befores and afters are cropped the way you want them, but are different sizes, perhaps the before larget than the after, so they need to be re-sized and then joined into one image, the charge is $4.50 per before/after pair.

If the separate befores and afters need to be cropped, and you trust us to crop them reasonably, the charge is $5.50 per before/after pair.

If the photos are tinted, or need to be lightened or darkened, or require other coloration touch-ups, the charge is $7.00 per before/after pair.

If the photos are prints, and they need to be scanned and completely prepared digitally, the charge is $10.00 per before/after pair.

If you want us to scan, or crop, or color-adjust your photos, you'll have to trust us to do it right. These prices don't include going back and forth because you think the outcome wasn't perfect. View Dr. Denenberg's app to see how we handled his photos. If you are very very picky, you should process your photos before sending them to us. Your Photoshop person can handle it fine!

If you are sending your photos such that the before photo is a different file than the after photo, be sure to send them so it is completely clear which two photos belong together in a before/after pair, and (don't laugh) which photo is the before and which is the after: if the images depict a procedure that our Photoshop person is not familiar with, she may not know! You can name the files like this:

SmithBob23before
SmithBob23after

Return to Resource Submission Instructions page

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