Most photos that are used on the Learning Commons site are downloaded from Flickr—selected from photos available from UBC-related Flickr accounts or searched under the Creative Commons Advanced Search option. Here is a screencast that illustrates how to go about doing this:
Photos should be 600w x 300h and the most effective ones are evocative, graphic, high resolution and interesting. Only JPGs, GIFs and PNGs file types should be uploaded. If you need to resize a photo you can use Picnik, an online photo editor.
You also need to attribute the original author of the photo. Here is an example of photo size and attribution.