How to effectively Manage your Photo files

Whether you’re emailing photos of your grandkids or putting images of your latest product on your online store, many people don’t optimize 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 always show up on your site as you intended.

1. Make a back up of the original format of your image. Never, ever alter the original! Believe me you will regret it. Burn it to disc and file away. (I use rewritable discs  so I can keep adding to them)

 

2. Copy the image to your computer. This is the one you will make the changes to. Open the image in your photo editing program

3. 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.

4. 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. (If you’re using Photoshop you can create actions to automate this process, more on this in the Photoshop tips & techniques category)

5. Reduce the colour palette. This is a great idea for images intended for web viewing only. Many images have millions of colours so you can reduce the colours to 256. You will lose some depth with this, but for viewing on the web it shouldn’t matter. If you keep the images small in size the smaller resolution will not be as obvious.

6. 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.

If you’re creating a web page remember every photo that you add will add to the time it takes to download all of the images, so don’t make the image larger than it needs to be for your intended audience.