It seems that every six months or so, digital cameras and phone cameras hit the market with more and more megapixel capability. These days, 10 megapixels is a pretty standard sensor rating even in small point-and-shoot cameras. Smart phone cameras are already entering the 5 to 8 megapixel range. All these megapixels produce excellent digital pictures. They also produce digital files the size of buses.

A single picture right out of today’s consumer cameras can easily be 3 megabytes or more in size. Pushing a 3 megabyte picture out of a blog page is roughly akin to trying to move a shipping container strapped to the top of a VW. It’s a lost cause.

There are two preparatory steps necessary to get a picture fit for web display before you upload the picture to your blog or other web display space. The process is called image optimization. (search “image optimization” for lots of how-to info and online tools)

Step 1 – re-dimension the picture to the actual dimensions in pixels that you want it to display once it is inserted in the web page. Keep in mind that the bigger the picture is dimensionally, the bigger its file size will be, even after compression.
Step 2 – compress the final picture after you re-dimension it using an image optimizer utility that outputs to an image format suitable for display on web pages – usually jpeg, gif or png.

Check out/download the free desktop program, VirtualStudio from OptikVerve Labs to help you with prepping your pictures for web publishing.

http://www.optikvervelabs.com/virtualstudio.asp

Size and touch up your original photo in VirtualStudio. When you “Save As“, look for the Advanced button on the save dialogue. Click this to find a compression slider. 80% on the slider is a good starting point. (jpeg images.) If you are saving as a GIF file you will find the number of colours under the Advanced button, starting at 256 scale this back to 128 or 64 to cut the file size.

Making sure that your images are well optimized before you load them to your web page or blog will ensure that you are not balooning the overall weight of your page and causing load time to slow to a crawl.