Christine's Blog Templates

Tips For Preparing Images To Go Online

• Begin with a high quality image- this comes from your camera or scanner.
• Work with a copy, keeping the original unchanged.
• Crop to what you are going to display on the blog while the image is large and high quality.
• Know the width and height restrictions of the area you're planning to display the image in- you don't want an image too large for the space, it will make your layout display incorrectly. (If you put your bed into a shoe box, the shoe box has to break- same with forcing large images into small spaces.)
• Make the image the size it will display on the page (don't use html or css to resize)- larger means extra time downloading and a poorer quality display, smaller will mean a poorer quality display. Artificially resizing distorts the image, the picture will look it's best at it's real size.
• When you save, try a low-ish quality jpg to start and see how it looks. If it's ok, then use it. If you want better quality image then go back to the high quality image to save again at a slightly higher image quality than your previous attempt.
• Do this until you find the lowest quality setting that creates a nice image because the lower quality, the smaller the file size, the faster your page will load. You'll fit more images into your allowed storage space, and use less of your allotted bandwidth. Every time a .jpg is saved, image quality is lost, so thieves will find themselves with a low quality image.
• Every time you save a jpg, it loses quality. Do not save and edit and re-save the lower quality images- they will look trashy quickly. The trick here is to always go back to the high quality image and save from it.
• For faster page loading- don't put images larger than about 80kb on your blog, and if you do post images that large, stick to one per page.
• Never ever put a .bmp file online- they are much too large and there's no reason for it. Use a .jpg or .gif.
• If you put a lot of images on your blog, I highly recommend you decrease the number of posts you show per page, this will speed loading time.
• Any image online can be stolen, you can't prevent it. Don't put any images online that would cause a problem if they were stolen. Don't be a thief of other people's work and property, it is illegal, and not very nice.
  • No right click is annoying and does not prevent image theft.
  • Using lower quality images makes any thief stuck with even lower quality (because every time you save a jpg, it loses quality).
  • Splitting the image into many smaller images then displaying with a table will make it a little harder to steal, but not much.
  • Putting your name or url on an image often deters others from taking it, especially if you place it where cutting it off will damage the image.