Image formats
.jpg .gif and .png files can be used.
We do not recommend using TIFF.
Image sizes
BowerBird will save several file sizes of the images you upload to a BowerKit. Because of this, we recommend uploading high res images (10mb) to avoid having to send print publications a second link with additional images.
Low-res (1200px wide) - Web content
Hi-res (original size as uploaded) - Print content
Max image size
Max images size is approx. 20mb / image.
Technically, if an images takes longer than 30 seconds to upload and more than 10 seconds to process, it will be rejected. You can attempt to upload much larger images, but you'll face two main problems. The first is that your internet may dropout halfway through the upload, and the second is that it will take a long time to process your images to make smaller copies that can be used by journalists. A 150mb image, for example, may take 10 min to upload and then 10 minutes to process. So for a large image set, it's faster to resize the images on your desktop and then upload them.
My photographer has given me very, very large images! What should I do?
Each year we see cameras come out with more and more megapixels. This is great if you're printing billboards, but for most use cases it makes things harder. The images are so large that they are hard to process and take ages to upload. So what can you do?
Ask your photographer to export a version of the images at max 20mb. This is large enough for an A3 double page magazine. This is also much easier for the photographer to do because they're exporting images for you anyway. Software like Lightroom allows the photographer to export entire image sets at a specific resolution. So for the photographer it's just another image size to export.
Cut down the images before you upload them. This can be a little painful, but it's actually faster than trying to upload mega huge images and trying to get online services to process them. You can use tools like Photoshop to batch resize (read this post).
PDFs
PDFs are not supported, as journalists will need image files to use in their stories and you should do this manually before uploading to BowerBird for best results.