Photographs, images, pictures are one of my favorites! There is nothing like the visual eye to portray an idea and make the day brighter. The old adage a picture is worth a thousand words. It still holds true but are you getting all the viewing your photographs deserve? How many people leave the website or blog because the download is so slow they don’t have the patience to wait?
The average surfer gives you an attention span of 30 seconds before moving on. If that 30 seconds is wasted watching a little ticking of seconds roll by while your graphic of huge proportions downloads, they won’t remain around to see it, unless it’s Uncle Harry or Aunt Sally that just must see your website.
Key Things to Remember
You want quality but not at the expense of not being seen.
And you want a decent size for people to view.
Let’s achieve this.
The main item we need to look at for the web is to use a medium where we can save a file that will upload fast without too much loss of image quality. The types of formats we can save in will affect the size of the image. I made a lousy first website many years ago when I knew absolutely nothing about this sort of thing. Takes time but I learn. Here goes. There are two types of saving are possible either lossless or Lossy. Several types of files fall under these two headings, so there are numerous types of file names, which could be applicable.
Lossless
Into this group, you will have .tiff .gif and .png. Basically, this group retains the original image size while compressing the data. .Png is my choice here because; it is optimized to give full color. If you are using graphics you can use the gif file successfully but in photographs it has too much loss of color for me. I like the png format for the main structure of the web. There is a new format out with the latest Photoshop, but I haven’t experimented enough with it as yet.
Lossy
Jpeg falls under this bunch, and the lossy refers to a small amount of distortion that this format picks up in adjusting the image size.
If you are using this format and are using Photoshop it is possible to use different qualities of Jpeg. If you don’t have Photoshop, there are websites that will compress the jpeg format further for you.
One of the website tools that allow you to do this is here.
Make Your Decision
We really have two options. Jpeg or Png. Jpeg is the most widely used, but you do get a certain amount of image distortion. It’s very small and you probably only notice it if you print something and compare the two sizes. Png on the other hand retains its size. The advantage here is the size of image you will see on the web.
You tend to get sharper and clearer lines with Png. At the end of the day it’s your decision. Personally I go for the med Jpeg picture for loading the initial page and allow the rest of the .pngs to upload behind it while the web visitor is reading the first page.
