DESCRIPTION & INTRODUCTION: This is a quick tutorial on how to save your photos as jpg for the internet, particularly when you link from a forum to a larger image. Many people are still on dialup - it's easy to forget them once we upgrade to a fast internet package. Even if you link to your image (eg via thumbnails and hosted on Photobucket), it's still nice to get your image down from say, 1 megabyte, to as low as 40 kilobytes and under. It's just an act of courtesy. I personally won't load un-optimized images, and I'm on fast internet. Plus I'm on a monthly quota and don't want to use that up on large images. So if you want people to ooh and ahhhh over your photos, do them a service and get that size down. By resizing first, your image will still look just as big but have fewer pixels, making for quicker loading.

INSTRUCTIONS:

Here are screenshots to show you size and load time for both dialup and fast internet. As you can see, 38 secs for a image over 1MB is going to make dialup people ignore your pretty pictures, no matter how much you love your work. If the "Quality" slider is also more than 75 (not necessary for internet), the load time will go higher still:

Getting the size down from 2048 pixels (or even 1000 pixels) to 600 pixels will make a lot of difference to load time, but no noticeable difference to picture quality onscreen:

So here's the lowdown:

1. Open the image you wish to display online.

2. Ctrl G on your keyboard to open the Resize dialogue box. Type 600 in the Width or Height box, whichever has the highest measurement. Make sure Aspect Ratio is ticked. Click OK. (Here is where you decide the size. If the image was to go straight into a thread on a forum, unlike a linked image as we are discussing here, check the forum's pixel size limit.)

3. Press F4 on your keyboard. This brings up the JPEG Image Optimizer. Use these settings but Quality: 75 is probably the most important:

5. Click OK and upload your image to the internet.

Thank you for taking the time to read my tutorial.

Hillie © May 2008