Optimize Your Photos for the Web

January 13, 2008 | By Doug In Digital Cameras |

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.

The Cyber-shot T9 - a stylish and super slim digital camera with double anti-blur technology - combining a Super SteadyShot Optical Image Stabiliser and High Sensitivity, as well as 6.0 effective Megapixels, ZEISS 3x Optical Zoom and a large 2.5 inch LCD.
Used Price: ?184.99
Customer Review: Only buy if you are interested in blurry pictures…
I didn’t enjoy this camera at all. I owned it for a year and it suddenly stopped working on me. Secretly, I was very pleased as now I have an excuse to buy another camera! My biggest complaint however is in focusing, I found all of the extra settings for things like sport shots, or landscape shots etc were useless if they didn’t include a flash as the photos just didn’t work - they ALWAYS came out blurry. No such thing as anti-shake with this camera apparently!! However, when using the flash I found most pics did come out fine, but when you didn’t have the flash on and it was a low light - forget it!!
Customer Review: Excellent value!
My boyfriend bought this camera last year for our holiday to Florida and we used it for the full week we were there - it is great! The picture quality is fantastic and even when you get the photos downloaded they are fantastic! No problems on our part and we paid more than ?200 for it! We have had it for over a year now and are still using it for our holidays and it hasn’t broken or anything. Buy this if you want a brilliant quality of pictures! I cannot fault this camera at all.
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Used Price: ?229.99
Customer Review: Great Camera
I purchased this product in the US about six months ago and the most useful facility that is not mentioned in the spec; is the email facility. When activated, the camera takes a normal picture at whatever resolution you have selected and stores a seperate picture in another folder for emailing. So without any further effort you end up with your full photo e.g. 1600 x 1200 @ 800 -900kb and a duplicate picture for emailing of 320 x 240 @ 15 - 17kb. An ideal facility if you intend email your photographs to others. The only down side is the camera does not come with a viewfinder (can be purchased as an accessory), so you have to use the LCD, but once you get used to it, its fine and the camera as enough other benefits to make it a worthwhile purchase.
Customer Review: Brilliant product from Sony - lots of fun!
I just bought this product last week and I can’t believe how much fun it is. The main reason why I bought it was because of the CD-RW feature. I also have a CD Writer in my computer so I don’t even have to finalise the CD to read it. I can just take it out of the camera, and put it onto my computer and copy the files over. It’s really easy to use. The software for video editing that comes with it is also great. I took a 1 minute mpg of my newborn nephew and copied it over to my computer. I was then able to edit audio, cut and splice frames and add in my own text affects. There are lots of features to produce it including output to a video. There are just so many possibilities with this camera and though I sometimes wonder if I should have bought the MVC-CD300, I still think this is a great product. If you’re thinking about buying this product, you should also think about the Starter Accessory Kit too.
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