Reducing the size of Photographs

Here are some tips and examples of reducing the size of photographs for the web, based on research undertaken in November 2004.

There are three things you can do to reduce the size of photographs:

I have found the following guidelines (and I am using them as they seem to make sense to me):

I then used PaintShop Pro version 8 to test these ideas and the following photographs were produced.

The initial photograph recorded on a camera was 2048 x 3072 pixels (3.87 Mb size) - it is not included here as it would take so long to download.

Resized to 328 x 492
72 pixels per inch
No compression

File Size: 84K

Resized to 328 x 492
72 pixels per inch
Compression of 10%

File Size: 25K

Resized to 328 x 492
72 pixels per inch
Compression of 20%

File Size: 15K

Resized to 328 x 492
72 pixels per inch
Compression of 50%

File Size: 4K

Thumbnail
Resized to 61 x 92
72 pixels per inch
No Compression

File Size: 4.5K

Thumbnail
Resized to 61 x 92
72 pixels per inch
Compression of 20%

File Size: 1.9K

These examples illustrate that keeping the sides of photographs down to a maximum of 500 pixels and compression around 20% produce good web photographs of less than 30K.


 Last Updated: 14 November 2004 by Peter LeCornu peter.lecornu@netspeed.com.au