OPTIMIZE YOUR PHOTOS AND IMAGES FOR USE ON WEBSITES

Pictures and Photographs make the Internet a lovely place to visit! The only problem with putting Photographs on Websites is that it increases the amount of time that they take to load.

Even if your Photos aren’t destined for a Website and you just want to email them it’s important to optimize them, otherwise you’ll annoy people, when they take hours just to receive your one Photo!

So many people don’t even think about optimizing their Photos, they just Download a 7 MB File from their Digital Camera and send it as an E-mail attachment. Of course this annoys many people because it completely clogs up their Internet Mail Box, until then can get hold of the Picture.

Even with so many people using Broadband it’s very annoying to have to Download such a large File! And imagine the frustration of everybody who still uses Dial-up Internet, Many people still stuck using Dial-up must curse and swear at your E-mail!

People like to use the Internet and E-mail because it’s quick, nobody will wait hours for a Webpage to fully load. How many of us have been on Websites where the images took a lifetime to load, and then some of them even failed to load ? Most of us! Well most people won’t wait for the Pictures to Load, if it’s not quick they’ll just close the Website.

The Internet is full of WebPages and if it’s too slow to get the information from your site, the Users will just close it and look elsewhere. This is reason, why it’s important to optimize your Photos for use on the Internet.

Before you start messing about with your Images it’s a good idea to:

• Move the Photos from the storage card of your Digital Camera to your Computers Hard Drive.
• Save a Backup of the original.
• Make sure you don’t overwrite the original.

It’s very important that you keep a Backup of the original for a number of reasons. If you ever want to print this Photo out, then you will want to print the high resolution Picture, not the Web optimized version. Also if you make a mistake when Editing your image it’s handy to revert back to the original.

To optimize a Photo for the Internet you will want to make the File Size as small as possible, to do this:

1. Crop the Image. Cropping removes any unnecessary parts of the Photo. Think of it as cutting your printed Photo, you can cut (or crop) the Photo to make it smaller in size and remove artefacts that are not relevant.
2. Resize the Image. The Image your Digital Camera takes will be huge, resize this to a suitable size for your Website. Try to make it no bigger than about 250 pixels Square.
3. Your Digital Images use millions of different colours, only 256 colours are needed, so reduce the colour depth in your Graphics Editing Program.
4. Save the Image, JPEG Format is the most common Format, because it offers quite a good compression.

Websites without Pictures can be boring, but remember to make sure you don’t go over board. Photos may improve the Website, but they can also kill them too!

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