Image size on photo portfolio website?

[Vcize]

I'm putting together a portfolio site for my photography on wordpress. I think the images look best when viewed full screen, and I was planning on uploading them at full resolution as TIF's for the best quality.

Of course, I quickly came to realize that that is a horrible idea since it slows down the website to a crawl.

So I've switched to JPG's, but at what resolution should I upload them? At full resolution they range from 8mb-23mb in size. When wordpress displays smaller versions of the images will it just downsize those or actually load smaller images that are smaller in size? Should I limit the resolution before I upload them and, if so, what is a good size barometer for limiting the long edge?

 

[Richard Weisgrau]

Check out this link .

 

[ambercool]

Check out this link .

 

[Vcize]

That link is good, but it seems to focus more on traditional websites.

I've always kept my image size down on a typical website (blog, etc). I guess my question is more specific to a portfolio website and whether it being something that focuses on quality images means you should go outside the norm of sacrificing image quality for page speed. It sounds like not so much...

 

[ambercool]

That link is good, but it seems to focus more on traditional websites.

I've always kept my image size down on a typical website (blog, etc). I guess my question is more specific to a portfolio website and whether it being something that focuses on quality images means you should go outside the norm of sacrificing image quality for page speed. It sounds like not so much...

Well... I have 3 pretty big splash screens and the load fairly quickly, so I would think that a 5MB jpeg should load even faster if you compress it that small.

--
-Viet
http://www.ambercool.com
"Luck comes to those who do"

 

[crashpc]

Hello. I think it´s not healthy to put full resolution images online. Most people look at it with FullHD screens. Some on bigger, some on smaller. If you want to use some nice galery and the image should be visible at one piece without scrolling, 1200x800 is very usable. For full screen image one usually needs to scroll from one side to another, which I consider very uncomfortable and not professional. That way You can easily fit this image into around one megabite large file.

 

[AndreaV]

I'm putting together a portfolio site for my photography on wordpress. I think the images look best when viewed full screen, and I was planning on uploading them at full resolution as TIF's for the best quality.

Of course, I quickly came to realize that that is a horrible idea since it slows down the website to a crawl.

So I've switched to JPG's, but at what resolution should I upload them? At full resolution they range from 8mb-23mb in size. When wordpress displays smaller versions of the images will it just downsize those or actually load smaller images that are smaller in size? Should I limit the resolution before I upload them and, if so, what is a good size barometer for limiting the long edge?

Hi. If it's to view in a web browser and not to download it it doesn't make sense to use full resolution TIFF. The best is to use JPEGS converted in sRGB color space (it's probably one of the worst color space, but it's the 'de facto' standard for the web... if you use others you risk that who looks your images will see wrong colors).

As for the resolution: full resolution make sense only if you expect people to do pixel peeping... and usually I guess you just want people to appreciate your image all together. A full HD monitor has a resolution of 1920x1080 pixels, that means about 2Mp... anything above that is only a waste of bits (and could even result in worse IQ since the browser will need to downsample your image to show it). If I upload photos in good resolution I usually use about 1600pixels for the long edge.

I would keep the size of the files lower than 500kb. If every image is several Mb it's most likely that people will just get tired while loading them and switch to another website without even looking at your nice pictures.

 

[Kixel Pix]

I feel that using 2048 pixels long, with 72 ppi, with 80% quality works extremely well, and saving them as jpegs. I don't know how others feel about this, but you can see my images on my website.

www.kixelpix.com

hope this helps!

 

[fmehdi]

i think its true ...

 

[Eerik Sandstrom]

I’ve been told to keep the file size to 500kb or Google might penalise you in SEO, but some images loose quality fast, especially if you are crushing a massive file. It’s a balance, I’m sticking with 1 - 2mb.. you don’t want your images looking average to a potential client..