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Optimising
Photos for online use.
How to Optimise [Optimize]
photos for use online?
One of the most important things to remember when uploading/using
photos from your camera online is that the photo size
that our camera's take are quite large. In fact they
are too large for use online.
It is important to remember that many Internet users
still use a dial up connection for surfing the web.
An average photo taken from a camera is over 300KB,
some even up to 1MB in size.
Keeping your photos to under 20KB is ideal, but this
is often hard to do. You really don't want you photos
to be any larger than 50KB for online use. As the file
size increases, so does the load time.
Online we work in pixels. Off-line we work in cm or
inches.
To give you an idea, an average photo that's taken with
a digital camera is about 900 x 600 pixels or 3.9"
x 2.6". See my menu buttons on the left? They are
155 x 40 pixels in size and they take up about 1/5 of
this pages width (if viewed on a 17" monitor).
If I were to upload a photo directly from my camera
that is 900 pixels wide, then the photo would take up
the visitors entire monitor screen.
So what you need to do with your photos is reduce their
size in both dimension and file size. I don't mean simply
grabbing the corner of an image and reducing the size
as even though this will reduce the width and height
of the photo, it won't reduce the actual file size,
so it will still take as long to load online when viewed
by a visitor.
There is a great little program (that's free to download)
called Mihov Image Resizer and you can download it here
This software is also a great tool for making thumbnails
of your photos for your site.
Ideally you want to reduce your .jpg images to be no
wider than 500 pixels. The program will automatically
reduce the height whilst maintaining the original ratio.
Personally I feel that 450 pixels wide is large enough
for online use.
If you feel that an image is best provided in it's original
size, then use image resizing software to create thumbnails
say 80 pixels wide and then place a link on the thumbnail
to so that visitors can view the original if they have
the time to wait for it to load.
There are other programs that will also reduce the file
and photo size for you. I have just found that the Mihov
program does it simply and it works. I am not an affiliate
of theirs either BTW, I am just promoting what I believe
to be a great little tool for those of you starting
out online to be able to make your web sites are as
user friendly as possible for your visitors.
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