Optimizing your pictures for the web

[beamdune]

Just opened one of the 'out and about threads' and noticed the page took a while to load. The post included a dozen or so photos.

I saved one of the images and noticed it was about 700kb. This seems rather big to me - not everyone is on unlimited download allowances.

As a quick test I resized the image to 800x600 (ish) and set the quality at 75 when saving. The file size reduced to 135kb. The picture still looked great.

I was wondering if one of the photo/image wizards could write a a brief guide to optimising your pictures for the web.

I'm just not sure what to suggest in terms of size, just that almost 1MB seems way too big.

 

[Bucephalas]

What software do you have?

Using photoshop and many others, you simply select "save for web" and it will strip out all exif info and compress it.

 

[beamdune]

I don't have photoshop and have typically just resized (to no more than 800 pixels wide) and saved at 75% quality any images I've uploaded.

Again, I was hoping someone more savvy that me could write a quick 'how to', with suggested image dimensions/file sizes.

As an example, Wayland's Snowball soup and other interesting recipes thread has plenty of (stunning) pictures. No doubt the original files are massive but the ones Gary has uploaded appear to be optimised nicely to display on a webpage.

 

[sandbender]

Create a Google 'account' for yourself if you don't already have one.

Instal Google's Picasa photo organising software.

Run the program, it'll try to find all the photos on your PC and allow you readily browse and organise them (it does not move your photos unless you tell it to).

Click on one or more photos that you would like to post online or to this forum.

The first time you do this the program will ask you to sign in with your google account data.

The images once uploaded will have been automatically resized for internet viewing, if you still think they are too large you can change the default upload settings to something you prefer.

Thats it really.

Here is one I made earlier.

Edited to add:

If you are fairly organised and already have your photographs sitting in a hierarchy of folders and would rather Picasa only looked at those and not at your entire hard drive, you can tell it to do so.

If you (like me) are slightly freaked by all the facial recognition thing that so many photo organising programs use these days, you can turn that off.

 

[beamdune]

Thanks. I'm obviously not making myself entirely clear though (nothing new there).

Can anyone state (with something to back it up)
'please don't link to pictures more than xxxx by xxxx and bigger than xxxx - they will be slow to download and will look just as good at a smaller size, xxxx is an good size.'

 

[rik_uk3]

If your scanning photo's for the web 300dpi is fine. Several years ago on the stove forum the site owner asked us to reduce the size of posted images, 640x480 proved to be absolutely fine.

This little programme for Windows works like a charm
http://imageresizer.codeplex.com/

When installed, right click on an image and you'll see the resize option, click on that and you'll have various size options available including 'custom' which I set to 640x480. The original image stays there and the smaller image is renamed.

Original image here is 4.8mb

resized to 640x480 its 28.6 KILO byte

Perfect for forums.

 

[The Big Lebowski]

Here is one I made earlier.

That's fairly Impressive sandbender... Coming up as 60kb still with lots of detail.
Guilty as charged, most of mine are around 500kb, but that's compressing them from 4+Mb.

Food for thought.

 

[Lister]

Whenever i did web imagery, photos in particular, always stuck to 600x400 or 400x600 or as close to and saving at PNG24 instead of JPEG dropped the filesize also.

 

[sandbender]

That's fairly Impressive sandbender... Coming up as 60kb still with lots of detail.
Guilty as charged, most of mine are around 500kb, but that's compressing them from 4+Mb.

Food for thought.

The default from Picasa seems to be 72dpi but size (width and height) is large, however maybe that isn't so good for smaller screens?

The original image pictured above was 2.7MB and 3072 x 2304 pixels.

 

[beamdune]

Great stuff guys.

It would seem it's perfectly feasible to post large, good quality images that come in close 100kb in size (maybe less).

The 'Pictures and photos: how do I post them?' thread mentions a maximum picture size of 600px by 600px, but that is just for pictures to to uploaded to and hosted on BCUK.

It would seem a good idea to suggest users resize their images to a similar size (before uploaded to photobucket etc) if they're planning on linking to them in threads.

I'm sure people already do this to some extent, but the examples posted above by sandbender, rik (and Wayland's posts) are particularly good.

 

[R3XXY]

A simple solution is to reduce the image quality on your camera so the image takes less memory.

I keep my camera on the lowest resolution and all my pics come out fine and very very rarely need resizing,

they upload to a hosting site more quickly and load more quickly when embedded in a thread.

 

[rik_uk3]

A simple solution is to reduce the image quality on your camera so the image takes less memory.

I keep my camera on the lowest resolution and all my pics come out fine and very very rarely need resizing,

they upload to a hosting site more quickly and load more quickly when embedded in a thread.

But then all you have are low quality images, no good at home or if you want to print them off. Shoot in high quality and then make a smaller size copy.

 

[Stew]

If you're bothered, you can set photo bucket to auto resize your pics when you upload them.

 

[sandbender]

If you're bothered, you can set photo bucket to auto resize your pics when you upload them.

I used to use Photobucket a great deal, all of the images I'd post here would be hosted with them, however over the last few years it has become bloated and buggy and for me quite unusable.

I still use flickr, but as I organise my images on my machines with Google Picasa it has just become easier to use Google to host the images I post here too.

 

[beamdune]

If you're bothered, you can set photo bucket to auto resize your pics when you upload them.

My point in starting this thread was that folks should be bothered - I was after some guidance on sensible dimensions/file sizes.

Linking to pictures that you have gone to the trouble of uploading some but couldn't be bothered to resize to something more appropriate for the web seems, well, thoughtless.

 

[Stew]

No, I understand your point.