picture size

[Margaret]

I have had a number of my customers tell me that thier computer crashes when they go to my website because the pictures are too big. How do I make the pictures smaller but still of good quality. My pictures are of jewelry.

[bobothecat]

Hi Margaret, and welcome to WebmasterWorld.

What size are you're pictures now? e.g.: 100x200, 300x500, etc...

What file-type are you saving your pictures as? e.g.: gif/jpeg/png... etc.

What graphics program are you using?

The more information you could provide ( without providing links/url's), the easier it would be to help.

[Margaret]

They are 700x1803 79076 bytes.

[Margaret]

Thank you. I save them as jpegs. I just wore out my canon scanner and could only find a hp scanjet 4010 scanner. So I am using the hp software that came with it to try to make the pictures smaller . Margaret

[rocknbil]

It's not likely their computer crashes, they most likely get impatient and because the browser won't respond while it's loading, consider it crashed. But those are definately huge images.

You should probably get comfortable with a good graphics program and size the display image somewhere around 200 X 200 px and make it so when it's clicked, the larger version displays.

[thecoalman]

Do a search for Irfanview, it's a free image utility that I find indespensible when working with large sets of images. You can cut, crop, resize but more importantly you can do them in batches.

Most likely your scanner software is defaulting 90% or 100% quality which will give you very large files. 90% is not that bad but 100% will give you enormous files. Use the batch tool in Irfanview under file> Batch conversion/rename, and lower the quality to 75%. You may want to copy your originals to a new folder before doing this to insure you don't accidently overwrite them.

You can use the same tool to resize them all at once to create thumbnails which as suggested above you can use to link to the larger image.

If you have a lot of imgages thet you will be continually adding look into getting a server side image management/gallery like Coppermine Photo Gallery. This does all the work for you including generating the thumbnails.

[Margaret]

Ok thanks. Do you have any program recommendations? Margaret

[Margaret]

Your email came in just as I typed the question. I will check into those. Thanks. Margaret

[akmac]

Margaret,
Photoshop will be your best bet, but it is not free. Ideally, your largest images should be not more than 500 pixels on the longest edge. Depending on the composition of your photos, they should be smaller than 100 kilobytes for the largest version. Also, consider having a small thumbnail image that will open to the full size image when clicked.

No reason to cause your visitors to choke on large files, I find a 60% quality jpeg is sufficient quality for web display.

[Margaret]

Thank you. I will check into photoshop. Margaret