There are several reasons you may want to upload posters to a blog, such as to make posters presented at a conference publicly available, to publicize a research project, or to display posters from a class. If you are teaching a class that includes a poster assignment, it would be nice to upload class posters so that students can see what their classmates have done and also to promote their work.
But what file format should you use? And how will they appear on the blog once you upload them?
Uploading posters: file types
You probably used either PowerPoint or InDesign to create your poster. The file formats you are most likely to consider for uploading to a blog are jpeg, pdf, and ppt (PowerPoint).
You can upload a PowerPoint file to a WordPress blog. However, the drawback to this is that the PowerPoint file will not open from within WordPress. Instead the Powerpoint file will download to the user’s computer, which you probably don’t want.
An alternative to the above is to take a screenshot of the poster displayed on your computer, then save the screenshot as a jpeg file. This allows you to set the pixel dimensions to whatever size you wish. It also prevents anyone from downloading the original, high-resolution poster from your blog. An example:
Uploading posters: formatting the blog post
Usually the best way to display a group of images is to create thumbnails of the images that users can click. When someone clicks on an image thumbnail, and higher resolution version of the image then appears in a new window. An easy way to do this with a group of images is to use the Gallery feature of WordPress, which automatically generates the thumbnails, creates a layout for them within the blog post, and creates links to the larger versions of images.
You solved my problem, literally! Thanks! 🙂