Image size, how big is big enough?

we're talking pixel size here.

[ken_b]

My site is basically a large photo album. The photos are of large items, say 16 to 20 feet long.

When I stated this site 3 years ago I chose to use large images, 550 wide x 250 - 350 high in pixels. One image to a page.

That worked, but I'm not happy with it. The details of such large items get lost and often the details are the what the viewer is looking for. This leads to more images, which leads to page sizes that are unworkable, at least in my mind.

I'm thinking about reworking the whole site and using 300 or 400 pixel wide images as a base, and possibly thumbnails if there are more than say 3 or more images that need to be on a page.

Now, too my question.

Is 300 pixels big enough on a 19 inch monitor aor at say 1024 or 1280 resolution.

This is the part that makes me wonder, the image size/screen size/resolution relationship.

I use a 17" at 800x600 and the 300 pixel image works for me. 400 is better, but I'd like to do the 300 if it is workable at higher resolutions on bigger screens.

Keep in mind, I don't see all that well, so I question my owm judgement on this, which is why I'm asking. I think there's an old thread about this stuff, but I couldn't find it.

Any thoughts?

[celerityfm]

Speaking strictly as an end-user-- I know it would take more work, but I typically enjoy sites that give the user many choices of image sizes to look at for a product..

For example:

Your user pulls up a picture of a widget at 550 wide x 250 - 350 as you've described and then can click the image to pull up an even LARGER copy of the same image (say 800 wide) and perhaps even larger if neccesary after yet a 3rd click and an even larger image.

I've seen several photo galleries employ this technique (like Gallery gallery.menalto.com for instance) and IMO I think it is the best solution.

Just my 2 cents :)

[edited by: korkus2000 at 10:40 pm (utc) on Dec. 3, 2002]
[edit reason] delinked [/edit]

[korkus2000]

I like thumbnails on image sites. the big pages take so long to download and usually I am looking for something specific. I hate having to next through a whole bunch of huge nasa photographs. As for the big size a good standard size would be 320 width if you are using the 3:4 aspect ratio. I would either do 320 or 350. 400 may have diminishing returns in file size while 300 may not be large enough.

just my .02

[bonzibudy]

I agree with korkus, most of us still use modems(i think), images that size will take toooooo long to load. Easier and quicker to find what you want with good old thumbs

Thats my .02 :)

[JayCee]

One of my web clients is a real estate agent, and we opted to go with one image size for each of her home listing pages, with thumbnails used for only the summary page of all her listings.

Most of these listing pages have 2 to 3 photos, arranged vertically in a column. After some experimentation, I settled on 400 pixels wide, by whatever height. This was a balance between the need to see considerable detail in the photos, yet keep the page to a reasonable file size. Most of the photo file sizes are 20K to 30K jpg, for the required quality, so the pages really should be smaller in file size. However her target market has many more than the average number of broadband users.

I found that smaller than 400px wide was just too small to really see the 'product' well.

[ken_b]

Korkus; The 350 size seems to work well on my monitor anyhow. Like Jaycee, I'm concerned about keeping the images large enough to communicate clearly and still small enough to load reasonably.

And Celerityfm point about the "click to enlarge" concept would work for some images to.