Website image size

[chewyuk]

Hello All,

For those of you with your own websites, what size jpegs would you consider as big enough to ensure that:

A) you can see enough shot detail
B) that the web-site continues to load quickly

I know here TP restricts the file size to 160KB which seems enough, but if I had my own (which I don't) site what would be a good size to aim for? 160kb seems about the standard, although i have seen some requesting file size of 60kb

I am guessing this may be down to how much you are prepared to pay for the hosting service and the number of jpeg you are uploading?

Be interested to hear all of your thoughts and advice on this one ....

Cheers,
Neil

 

[Marcel]

While hosting limits need not necessarily be the deciding factor, they certainly need to be considered.

It also depends on how many images you plan to have on your website. I personally use a flickr pro account for all my photo hosting, but my professional site and thus my portfolio will be on my domain, and on this I will only put a selection of my work, the best of the best if you like. Therefore I can be quite cavalier about file sizes.

That said, I obviously don't want them too big to prevent peopel from viewing the site, nor do I want them too small to compromise quality.
It's all a trade off.

Personally, I use the save as feature (I like to keep EXIF in my shots, along with Metadata), and don'lt worry about the filesize. This is after I've bordered the shot and tagged it with my URL, and also resized it to 700 pixels along the longest edge.

It's very easy to get an 800px shot to 160k using the save for web feature, without any real compromise on quality, which was how we came about the 160k limit.

If its just you uploading your photos to your site, then at 200k, 5 photos take 1 meg, so 500 photos will take up 100 meg. That's alot of photos, and most hosting packages give 100meg out as a minimum now.

 

[Matt]

basically what marcel said, i keep my personal shots under 160kb for smooth running it reduces the chance of theft

 

[Marcel]

Forgot to say, after I do what I do to mine, they usually end up ranging from 120kish to up to 300k. Most are around the 200k mark.

Bear in mind too that EXIF takes up roughly 20k. So stripping that out (via the SFW feature) would save you 20k

 

[chewyuk]

Cracking advice, knew you all could help, hadn't even thought about tagging with website or EXIF. Both are key. UI have aslways used the save as web feature in photoshop, so pretty familiar with that.
I like to think that this would be just to display my best work, not sure I have enough of that yet though ! When I do, I suspect that it will sit at 20-50 shots, no more.
Just tinkering at the moment with a friend who is a developer, but want to try and get it as right as possible....

So what I'm getting here is 160kb is about right, ensure that images are tagged, framed and EXIF data if appropriate is embedded and stick to a lowish volumes of images.