Jan 10
13
Artist Portfolio Websites Tips – Fast Loading Optimised Gallery Images
Theres nothing more frustrating than waiting for what seems and eternity for a website or online image to load.
No doubt you have experienced this yourself, whether because the image that is loading is several megabytes bigger than it needs to be or because your Internet connection is too slow.
Whatever the reason, you will do your online portfolio a great service to remember that people just will not wait all day for your images to load. This can result in lost customers and lost work or sales.
Well, there is a way to minimise the load time problem, and it’s not that hard to do.
Optimise Your Images
Compressing and resizing images will dramatically reduce their size and load time. Don’t be concerned about reduced image display quality either, if you select the correct compression settings this need not suffer.
How To Optimise Images For The Web
So how do you go about compressing your images for the web?
Lets start with your image resolution. The following may seem a little technical but bare with me, you don’t need to understand it, you just have to do it. So briefly I’ll explain about image resolution.
- Images for print are usually saved as 300 dpi resolution but images for the web are saved as 72 dpi resolution. When you change down your images resolution to 72 dpi you immediately and dramatically reduce the byte size of the image. This can result a difference of several megabytes and that will have a huge impact on image load time.
- Okay, that’s image resolution discussed, now we want to talk about the actual print size of an image (it’s scale if printed out).Many digital cameras and scanners default settings will produce and image that is far bigger (in scale) than is required for use on the web. We want to ensure that the visitor viewing your gallery will not have to scroll an image to see it in its entirety. Most peoples PC monitor screen resolution is set to 1024 X 768 pixels. You’re image should be smaller than this size so that it’s visible without the need for scrolling. I usually save images for the web at around 600 X 400 pixels.
- The file type format that you save your image as will also affect the download speed. Artwork and photographs are usually best saved as Jpeg format. Save simple images that have little colour mixing or gradients as Gif. Most graphics software will give you a number of options to further compress the image. It’s worth experimenting with these tools. You will quickly become adapt at optimising images for the web once you are familiar with the process.
Other file formats for saving images include PNG, TIFF, PSD, BITMAP and many more but Jpeg and Gif are the standard and viewable on all PC’s.
Popular Graphics Software For Optimising Images
So now you know how to compress and optimise your images for your website gallery, what software applications can you use?
PhotoShop is the leading graphics software and using the “save for web” options makes compressing images easy. Other popular graphics software you can use includes Paintshop Pro and the free and extremely powerful open-source software “Gimp” (free to download, install and use).
So when compressing and optimising images to ensure the fastest load times for your portfolio gallery remember to change dpi to 72 resolution; reduce the actual print size of the image; and save the image as Jpeg or Gif file format.
Now that you can compress and optimise your images for the web, ensure you have an easy to manage portfolio gallery online to display your work. Check out GalleryFolio.com who offer complete and affordable set-up of excellent, easy to manage and easy to navigate online photo galleries, http://GalleryFolio.com
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