Finding your website pages taking forever to load? We see too many clients who manage their own content uploading images of unnecessary size and we hope that this tutorial will help to make your website and graphics load faster and more internet friendly.

First and foremost, you should not be uploading images straight from your digital camera. Images straight from digital cameras are way too large to display on any webpage; so we see a lot of clients out there using HTML to resize their images. This isn't always a bad thing - but it does eat up a lot of your resources (disk space and bandwidth) and also makes your web page slow to load. Some images that are resized with HTML can even be choppy and distorted. We highly recommend resizing your photos before uploading them to your site.

For an example, I took a picture of this adorable dog (mine!).

Cute, huh?

Straight off my digital camera this photo was 2MB (2592x1944) - that is much larger in size then most computer monitors; in fact it's triple the size of most monitors! Not only that, but you would most likely have to watch it "progressively" download, meaning it would load very slowly and from the top down in sections. You've seen that on other websites haven't you?

Using a photo editing program (such as GIMP), I resized my image to 400x300, with quality of 100% and the resulting file size only 173KB. But wait, I can do even better than that, if I lower my image quality from 100% to 50% my image becomes a mere 35KB. AMAZING!

Can you see the difference between 100% (top) and 50% (bottom)? Hardly.