Image resize | From the blog of Nicholas C. Rossis, author of science fiction, the Pearseus epic fantasy series and children's books

Image: Chris Graham

One of the most common mistakes I see when browsing friends’ blogs, is that they upload their images and photos unoptimized–i.e. full-sized. This matters for a number of reasons, top among which are the following:

  1. Large images mean you may run out of storage space. Your blogย host may then ask you to upgrade to a more expensive hosting plan.
  2. Large images take longer to display.
  3. Large images can eat up a reader’s monthly bandwidth when they’re visiting on a mobile phone.

Optimizing Your Images

Chris Graham,ย aka everyone’s favorite simian, recently posted a series of posts on the subject on his excellent blog, Chris the story-reading ape. These include detailed instructions on how to resize your photos and images on both the old WP-admin environment and the new one. Depending on your blog’s theme, you may want to resize them to as little as 600 pixels wide (my theme allows for larger photos, so I prefer a width of 1,024 pixels). He also has some bonus tips for displaying the correct images.

You can read the posts by clicking on the following links: