Thursday, March 11, 2010

ON BLOGGING ~ Photo Shop...


I like to take lots of pictures. Everywhere I go I'm snapping away - trying different settings, vantage points, and effects. Digital cameras make this possible without the need to wait for expensive film to develop. The results are also easy to upload. But do you practice the two steps to making your photos viewer friendly? If not, your page loads are taking forever and people will ditch your blog before they even get to see the great images you are trying to share.

First, you need to RESIZE your pixels. The pixel size, or dimensions, of the images our cameras take is huge, in order to provide for better quality prints. But for pure viewing, our screens have a much smaller capacity. So therefore you need to make your images have less pixels. 400px x 600px is a good range. Don't worry if the file itself looks like a little thumbnail. When it is uploaded to your blog it will be normal sized.

Second, you need to COMPRESS your image file. This is also referred to as Optimization or Quality in various camera and photo editing software. This will improve the speed of uploading the image on your blog for your visitors, allowing them the opportunity to be actual readers! Basically, you turn big Megabytes into smaller Kilobytes without sacrificing visual quality on the screen, improving page load times. No more than 50KB is a good level and 40KB is even better. So for example, if your original file size is 5MB, get it down by 10x to 50KB.

You can determine the current pixels and file size of your image by letting your mouse hover over the file or by right clicking on the file and selecting Properties. If the pixel dimension and overall file size is outside of the desired range, you can adjust them manually in your camera software or photo editing program of choice, or you can go to Image Optimizer.

This free online site allows you to select your file, choose the image quality and pixel dimensions (height & width) desired and it will automatically RESIZE and COMPRESS at the same time for you! I was introduced to it through my UpTake editor and it is quick and easy.

Regardless of the method you use, be sure to take these two steps before uploading images to your blog. The quality will not suffer and your page loads will be faster. Which means your readers will be happy, potentially turning them into followers.

8 comments:

Matty said...

Okay, I never considered this. Now I have to go check and see what size mine are.

LJ said...

I never think about these things when I upload pictures to my blog. I'm not even sure if I'd know how (the upload part I get, the changing sizes not so much).

kayerj said...

I've never heard of this--I assumed when I used the blogger picture upload button it fixed the size--small, medium or large depending on what I select. Do you mean I have to resize them before I use the upload tool in the blogger post?

Mike said...

Like I could really follow any of this! hahaha! You are giving me way too much credit!

Anonymous said...

Um, okay. I might have to revisit this onenext time I upload a picture. It doesn't take any time at all for our computer to load my pages, but we have a pretty fast computer. I'll look into it. Thanks for the extra work ;)}

Unknown said...

So true but I often forget. I usually do it on my psp7, if I remember to do it. I need to do it more often. Thanks for the reminder. Good advice.

Susan said...

I just realized that photoscape has this feature built in, so thanks for the reminder that everyone doesn't have the speed that I have. I resized my latest uploads.

Margot said...

I use lots of photos on my blog so knowing about pixel size was something I learned early. I know my blog is slow to load for some people but that number seems to be going down as computers improve. I still pay attention to the size of every photo. I've become obsessive about it.