Preparing and Resizing Your Photos for Web
Before you can upload your photos to your Web Site you need to prepare your photos or image files for the web.
Modern cameras have the ability to save photos to a compressed JPG format and the ability to select different size options or compression rates of the photo you are taking, sizes generally are Large, Medium and Small, Most photographers will shoot using the largest option which gives a larger and better print quality. Each size has a specific width and height dimension measured in Pixels and a compression ratio producing an overall file size. JPG’s at the larger settings will produce crystal clear images for print as they have more pixels per inch and are compressed at a lower % creating a massive image with a huge file size, which is measured in Megabytes(mb). 1mb =1024kb
Your website is also measured in the same dimensions and pixels. Which is often defined by the monitor you use on your computer? The smallest desktop monitor screen size is 1024x768 pixels. Websites are often made smaller than this and since your photos will be displayed within the site we often recommend images be less than 500pixels wide so that they can be displayed properly on the website and should have a file size smaller than 100kb so that they can be easily downloaded and displayed.
(It takes a longer time to send information from the server to the user’s computer hence large files can take an age to appear on the screen as a result viewers will get frustrated and navigate away or close the site.)
Resizing your image from its original size to a smaller more web friendly size becomes imperative.
An average photo will have a width and height higher than 2000pixels and a file size exceeding 1mb
For your website we need to resize and compress it to about 500pixels wide and a files size less than 100kb
Most photographers will use Adobe Photoshop or Adobe Lightroom to manage and manipulate their photos. But there are many online tools and free downloads available, allowing you to resize your photos and prepare them for the web.
Photos or images need to be a JPG format which can then be resized and compressed.