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:
- Large images mean you may run out of storage space. Your blog host may then ask you to upgrade to a more expensive hosting plan.
- Large images take longer to display.
- Large images can eat up a reader’s monthly bandwidth when they’re visiting on a mobile phone.
Optimizing Your Images
Chris Graham, 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:
Tweet This
Good to know. Thanks for sharing.
Thank you, Michelle! Merry Christmas 🙂
Thanks, Nicholas, I hope yours was merry, too.
Busier than expected, but otherwise fine 🙂
I hadn’t really thought about this and had no idea about the size and storage. I mean, I knew bigger pictures took up more storage, but never thought about how that affected my blog! Thanks for the info!
A pleasure! It’s funny how much of a difference small things like that can make in the long run.
Indeed.
I’ve always tried to make images smaller. I got the tip from an I.T. pro years ago, but I’ve never reduced as low as 600 pixels. Thanks for the advice.
I use between 1000 and 1200 for mine, to be honest.
Thank you for sharing the post on resizing photos. I started doing this when I finally realized how long it took to upload full-sized photos.
Well done! Now, I have to remember to do it myself 😀
Thanks for sharing, Nicholas! 🙂
A pleasure 🙂
Good points , thanks!
Thanks 🙂
I’ve had trouble with this myself, especially when I have to do Powerpoint presentations for promotional material in my professional work. It can be finicky but taking an extra five minutes to format images goes a long way as well.
That’s a great point; it’s not just for blogs. Thanks for the reminder!
That’s the thing: A lot of these marketing/promotional skills can/do transfer into traditional workplace skills as well. It’s always good to consider it.
I had been doing that too. Thanks for bringing this up!
Well done, then! I keep forgetting it 🙂
Thanks for sharing, Nicholas! I try to find images for my blog that are at least 1,000 pixels in one dimension, because I found that smaller ones just didn’t scale up well (they show pretty large on my blog). Luckily I’ve been saving them as jpg and not png — I didn’t even realize the difference in storage, that’s good to know! I can’t seem to use the same technique that Chris suggests: my Media Library looks different from his example, and editing the image shows most of the same information but not how much storage space the image takes up. I can’t figure out how to see that. However, I’ve been doing this for over three years and am only at 7.7% of my memory capacity, so that part’s not a problem. Still, I wonder if the images are too slow for some people’s phones..
The problems arise when people upload photos straight from, say, their cameras or phones. That creates huge files–over 1 MB each. Anything that’s up to 300Kb is fine. Since you are already saving as jpg and you’ve only used up 7.7% of your space, you’re fine 🙂
I save the photos to my computer before uploading them to WordPress, so I’m able to see their size from here. And wow, about half of them are over 300K — some over 3000K! I’ll pay closer attention to that from now on.
I did this too, in the beginning. I use “Smush-It” now to resize and smush my images. It’s been a big help. ??
Thanks for that! What is Smush-it? Do you have a link?
It’s a plug-in. WP Smush.
Oh, right! Thanks!
When I started adding photos, I made exactly this mistake. Very soon, I had used up almost 50% of my allowance from WP. Luckily, a fellow blogger suggested resizing images, and a good computer-savvy friend talked me through how to do it on Photoshop. I now post images of half the size, and they can still be enlarged, if required by the viewer.
Some of my followers who use mobile phones and tablets also complained of slow loading times on portable devices. Everyone should take this valuable advice on board, and stop posting large files.
Best wishes, Pete.
Thank you for sharing your experience, Pete! One thing that helps is to remember that you can change the image resolution as well as its dimensions. I usually give my images a max dimension of 1200 pixels and a resolution of 72 dpi. That helps a lot with size!
That’s a good point! As I think, I need to start to resizing my images. Thanks!
Me too, actually! I don’t always do that, and I should 🙂