How to Prepare Photos For The Web

James Maynard - November 02, 2012 | Lightroom, Photography Tips, Social Media, Technique, Tips

One of things that makes this age great is the Web and mobile devices. These are changing the way we live in many ways. It is also changing the nature of photography.

Photographs can be shared in any number of ways, both between individual people and on public and semi-public platforms such as Flickr, Facebook. Or in private galleries like Mosaic View. Individual blogs and websites are another outlet for your photographic art to be seen.

But, have you ever gone to a website (especially one featuring photographs), just to wait and wait for a page full of pictures to load and finally become so discouraged that you leave the site before ever getting to see the pictures that brought you to that website in the first place? If you want your photos to be seen by people, the last thing you want to do is to make it a chore for the viewer to see them.

The first thing you are going to have to do is to decide what you want to get out of your site or blog. If it is just to have a photo to go with an article, then you will have to resize your photo and then see if the file size is small enough to load quickly on the slowest systems.

But let us assume something more difficult – that you are an amateur photographer who wants to place his or her photographs on the web. Now, having an eye for quality means that your original photograph is somewhere around two and a half megabytes or larger. This results in an image of 3680×2760, which is far too large to use on any web page. Keep in mind that the pictures a digital camera produces is not going to be the same size as the sensor capability. The 2.5 meg photo just mentioned was taken with a ten megapixel camera. For most web pages or blogs, you will need to shrink the size of any images used on a page down to between a few and several hundred pixels on each side. This is the most important thing you can do to prepare your photos for the web.

If you are a Lightroom user, than Lightroom makes it very easy to resize your images on export. Just select the “image resizing” option on the Lightroom export dialog. This creates a new file for you to use on your blog or website. (more…)