Optimize Your Photos for the Web

November 20, 2007 | By Doug In kitchen appliance |

It doesn’t matter if your emailing photos of your grandson or putting images of your latest product on your online store. Too many people don’t consider optimizing their photos for the web. We’ve all been on too many web pages where it seemed that the photos would never load, and sometimes they didn’t. So here are some steps to make sure that your photos show up on your site.

1. Always have a back up original format copy of your image. Never alter the original. Believe me you will regret it.

2. Crop to size. Make sure that you crop out any extra information that isn’t needed. Remember the larger the photo the longer it takes to load or send.

3. Resize to reduce pixels. There should be an option to resize according to pixels. You’re going to want the largest size to be no more than 250 pixels or you can reduce the dpi to no more than 96.

4.Reduce the color palette. Many images have millions of colors so the first thing that you need to do is reduce the colors to 256. You will lose some depth with this.

5. Save the file in a standard format. JPEG is the most common for photos and you can compress the image with a JPEG for further reduction in file size. It’s not unusual to see GIF or PNG as well.

Remember that with a 56k connection a 150k file will take 20 seconds to load. If you’re creating a web page every photo that you add will add to the time it takes to download all of the images. If you keep the images small in size the smaller resolution will not be as obvious.

About The Author

Kelly Paal is a Freelance Nature and Landscape Photographer, exhibiting nationally and internationally. Recently she started her own business Kelly Paal Photography (www.kellypaalphotography.com). She has an educational background in photography, business, and commercial art. She enjoys applying graphic design and photography principles to her web design.

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Customer Review: Fantastic with one big limitation
This is a great item, easy to setup, and even easier to use. Watch and control Sky TV from your mobile phone, mac or pc. Biggest issue that isn’t mentioned in the product literature is that you can only access it from one device at a time - ie forget streaming to two computers in different rooms of the house. Even so, its still a great product and you will be not be disappointed with it.
Customer Review: A ‘Change Your Life’ Product
This is one of those devices that changes the way you think of how everyday things work. This has been as revolutionary to the way I think of TV in the same way that they ipod completly redefined the way I use music. The first time I had it working is what I can only describe as an ‘ipod moment’. The slingbox is a reason in itself to get broadband in your house. I had it set up in less than 30 minutes. The instructions were easy. I downloaded software onto my desktop PC and was quickly able to watch and control my Sky TV in my bedroom. The whole sky remote works in the software perfectly. Great. Downloaded the software onto my laptop, no problem in the house. Worked perfect. Great. The only snag I did hit was that it told me during set-up that it would not work outside my house (which is rather the point) however, the screen guidance told me what the problem likely was (my router) and how to solve it. 10 minutes later (with a wee bit of help from google) I was perfect again - and I’m glad the set-up told me this before I went out. So, I travel a lot with work, and have now been able to watch my home TV in real time, in Germany, Spain, Dubai, Australia, USA without any problem at all. Sitting on the beach, using the hotel wifi, watching the permier league on my laptop. How good is that? I have since signed up with the mobile operator Three who have a deal with sling and software so that you can even watch it on your mobile phone (extra tenner a month for unlimited use). It is mental! and it works! To be honest I don’t actually watch as much TV on my mobile as I thought I would (one of those things, just because you ‘can’ do something doesn’t mean you will… however, it has saved me several times because I can set the sky + or whatever using it. The phone thing isn’t an essential upgrade but it is a nice option to have. This is a genius gadget - cool for anyone - but ESSENTIAL for anyone who travels overseas a lot, gets stuck in hotel rooms, and misses TV. At under ?100 it is also just a ridiculous bargain.