I cannot tell you how many times I have seen it happen. Huge JPEG files sitting on my customers web sites and displayed at 200-pixels wide. This is a problem for several reasons.
- A huge waste of YOUR time: Uploading a large image to the server takes a lot of your valuable time.
- A waste of your visitors time: Large images even when displayed small still take a long time to download.
- A large image that is displayed as a small image looks choppy and unprofessional.
- A waste of Bandwidth: While most of your audience has high speed Internet, wasting bandwidth is still wrong. Bandwidth consumption is frequently headline news in Canada, no need to contribute negatively.
It is easy to make the mistake.
Your web site is convenient to update, you can make most updates yourself without having to contact me. You log in, you go to the page you want to edit, go into edit mode and make your changes. There is a handy image tool on the toolbar, you click on that and will find a useful tool for uploading the image you want from your computer. Once the image is on the server, you can select it, set the size and insert it onto your page. So easy, so convenient, but what you may not realize is that the image is still large even though you resized it when adding it to your page.
Some modules will handle resizing for you. The text module that you use for basic content editing will not. I really wish it did, perhaps that is a feature we can see soon.
It is easy to avoid the mistake.
Your digital camera is awesome, it takes 8 mega-pixel images all day long. These images are huge and the file size can easily reach 5 megabytes each. On my Internet connection, that would take 10 minutes to upload. If I was doing a gallery of images, I would have to start at night and go to bed.
If you are using a photo gallery module on your web site, resizing is done in real time as you are uploading, but you are still uploading the whole image. You must make your huge pictures smaller for your own sanity.
I very simple Image Shrinker is available for free from Iowa Comuter Gurus. If this link does not bring you joy, please email me and I will get you an alternative. Below is a screen shot of the Guru's work.
- Open Image Resizer, no installation is necessary.
- Select your save directory.
- Select the output size. I recommend 600 x 800 for photo galleries.
- If the image is to be used in the Text editing module, use a size that is appropriate for the page you are working on.
- Select an image suffix or leave it blank. This feature is handy for changing the images names so you know what to look for when working with the images.
- Press the "Select and Convert" button. Browse to your pictures, select as many as you like or even just one.
- You are now done the shrinking and your images are ready to upload to the server.
This is only one way to skin this proverbial cat, but it sure is simple.
Keeping your site professional looking is easily done and if you are having a problem, please call me or email me and I am here to help.
Using Windows Live Writer is another alternative, but I will save that for a future tutorial.