Using photos on a blog (part 2)
August 23, 2007 By: almostgotit Category: Uncategorized, technology, bloggingThere were so many great questions and comments to my first post about blogging with photos that I just have to follow up!
The quick instructions I gave in the previous post will work, and if getting too techy makes your head hurt and your elbows get all twitchy, then stop reading right here. Which is just fine. I’ll never love technology for its own sake either!
For those still reading, my brilliant brother has reminded me that it is still probably best (if you are able to do so) to optimize/compress your photos *before* you upload them anywhere. (Easy on Photoshop: just choose “save for web” option. With Corel or other photo programs, you can usually choose the “save as” command and specify that you want to save file at a higher compression — or at a lower resolution, which means the same thing.) This will make your photos load much faster, which matters for readers with a dial-up internet — especially if you use a lot of photos.
I do this all the time with my webpage work, but was just being lazy with the blog!
Optimizing isn’t really an option if all you’re doing is linking to photos someone else has already uploaded to Flickr, though, so a fast work-around is to use SMALLER versions of the photos! I may do this from now on, while optimizing my OWN so I can still use them at 500 pixels wide. I like ‘em big, especially when I am looking them on my tiny notebook’s screen!!
As you may gather by now, there are many ways to make blogging very complicated. It can quickly become overwhelming if you let it, so in a word: don’t. It’s perfectly acceptable to use a good shortcut until you have the time, skill and inclination to dig deeper and wider.
August 23rd, 2007 at 9:00 am
Thank you, as usual. When I have time, I’m going back to your earlier instructions and learn to wrap photos and text. Post some more blog tutorials. We all need them.
August 23rd, 2007 at 10:50 am
“—save file at a higher compression — or at a lower resolution, which means the same thing.”
They mean the same thing? I thought one had to do with the way the computer deals with photos and one had to do with the way the computer deals with the binary of the file.
I really don’t dive too deeply into photos because I have no artistic talent but it would seem to me that if you were one who cared a lot about the quality of photos you put on the web, it might make a big difference which way you went.
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A photographer or technophile could very well have a different answer than I, but in the end both “compressing” and “reducing resolution” produce smaller, faster-loading photo files, which is all that matters to me!
August 23rd, 2007 at 1:48 pm
Actually, ‘compression’ and ‘resolution’ are two different things. Compression refers to the way the file is stored on disk. Resolution is the pixel dimensions of an image (for instance, the banner above has a ‘resolution’ of 806px x 190px). Two image files can have the same resolution but have different levels of compression. The standard JPEG file format has many levels of compression and is considered ‘lossy’ compression, which means that the image degrades in quality the more it is compressed.
August 23rd, 2007 at 3:31 pm
I didn’t know that! You’ve explained it so very clearly (or, as they say here in the South, you’ve really “put it down where the hogs can get it”) which is very helpful. Thank you, Yep!
September 2nd, 2007 at 9:38 am
[…] MS Paint, then used Photoshop’s “save for web” option to reduce the file size by changing both the compression AND resolution! before uploading the whole thing back to my […]