Sizing Images In Posts

This first part details the sizing and saving of your images prior to uploading. If you’ve already worked through this and understand the best practices for saving images for the web, you may want to skip to Posting Images.

Images can be used in a variety of ways in your posts and Pages. They can be a major subject, or a referenced detail that enhances the information or story.

The first thing to consider is the size of the images. The size and quality of an image for use on a web page are determined by a variety of things:

  • Physical Size – The physical size of an image is based upon two things: The size of the image on the screen and the file size. Generally, the file size is treated as a different issue.
  • File Size – This is the size of the file on your hard drive or server.
  • Resolution – Resolution refers to the number of pixels in an image. Resolution is sometimes identified by the width and height of the image as well as the total number of pixels in the image.
  • File Type – There are several image file types that work on the internet. For photographs, jpeg is generally considered the best.

File size dictates the time it takes to load your page, the larger the file size, often increased because of a high image resolution quality, the longer it will take to load.People often don’t have the patience to wait through long web page loads, so keeping your file sizes low speeds up your web page access times. Typically, large high quality images should be kept between 100K and 60K. Smaller images should be closer to 30K and lower.

The resolution of the image dictates its clarity. The higher the resolution, though, the larger the file size, so you have to make a compromise between quality and file size. We recommend image resolution of 72 dpi for optimal viewing.

Luckily, the various file types most commonly used on the Internet have compression features. When you save the file as one of these types, it condenses or compresses the data information in the image file. Internet browsers can decompress this information to display the image on the screen. Some graphic software programs allow you to set the compression rate to control the quality of the image (and file size) at the time you save it. Depending upon your use of the images on your site, you may have to experiment with this to get the right ratio that keeps the resolution quality good while maintaining a small file size.
Not all graphic software packages allow you to resize images, though most should. Check your graphics software table of contents or index for resize, size, transform, reduce, or enlarge, all synonyms for the same thing. If they don’t have the feature, you may have to find different software.

You can resize an image by simply specifying the image’s final size. The advanced graphics programs allow you to set it by exact dimensions or a percentage of reduction or enlargement.
When you have fine-tuned your small sized image, export the image as a jpg.