How to Reduce Your Image Sizes

I’ve got Amy again today and she’s teaching you how to reduce image size!  I feel so fortunate to have Amy contribute to TCB. I know so many of you have blogging questions (me too!) and Amy is the perfect one to answer them.  Her site, Blogging with Amy is full of answers.  She knows how to explain things in a non-techy way and is always so nice. You can tell she truly wants to help people. If you have questions for Amy about this post, please leave them in the comment section and she’ll answer them there.  If she doesn’t get to them right away……give her a few days due to the holiday.  Today she’s teaching you how to successfully change the size of your photos.

Reduce the Size of a Picture

In my last post we talked about the importance of changing your image file names before uploading your photos to your blog. I mentioned that doing so is an easy way to boost your SEO (read: score brownie points with the search engines).

Today I want to talk about another common mistake people make when using images in their posts: file size.

Photo by Annafur.

Your camera takes BIG pictures

When you snap a photo with your camera, that image is a ginormous file. That means there’s a whole lotta digital data that goes into making that photo crisp, clear and super colorful.

All that data is good for the prints you have made to put in your scrapbook or hang above your fireplace. But on a website, all that digital detail is overkill. Your images will look just as lovely on your blog at a fraction of the size.

So, thou shalt resize your images before uploading them to your posts. Using images that are too big requires too many of your site’s resources and can really slow things down. And also, if you’re using a free blogging platform (like Blogger) you’ll reach your quote limit quicker.

How to resize your images

There are a many ways to do this. Here are a few tools that you might find helpful:

1. Use webresizer.com, an online tool that allows you to upload your original photo, click “Resize” and your image is instantly shrunk to a more manageable size.
2. If you use something like Photoshop or Photoshop Elements, use the “Save for web” feature.
3. Try Smush.it. You can upload files to be “smushed” or grab them from a URL too. If you’re using WordPress, there’s a Smush.it plugin you can install via your Dashboard as well.