How to maintain photo quality when compressing your images

It is very important that you learn these steps from the beginning as it can be frustrating and very disappointing when you wish to post an image on one of your social platforms to share with friends and like-minded followers and it appears to look poor and soft in terms of the quality. There is many crunching or compressing software that one can use to avoid this happening. Choose a free option that works and learn how to retain the visual quality no matter how much you need to compress the image.

It does not only affect the hobbyist photographer, but photographers at all levels including professional photographers who generate work through their visual portfolio. One of the most important things to remember is that a website needs to load quickly, within 10 seconds or less. Any longer will result in the visitor leaving the site. This is known as bounce back and the reason being that the image is not optimized and still larger than necessary, hence the fact being, larger files take longer to load and require compressions no larger than 600KB. No one wants to compromise on bandwidth, and yes this is possible to achieve. If you are concerned about your SEO and sire ranking performance, optimized sites are essential.

The best 4 Image formats settings for Optimizing your photographs

  1. Most photographers shoot in JPG as this is the general default and setting an most automatic camera and camera settings. JPGs are normally small in size and do not require much compression. Always shoot JPG smooth as the default option, as this will provide you with the best quality image. The size of an average JPG will range in size between 2 – 8 megabytes. Definitely printable, so long as one is aware of the size limitations before resolution is lost.
  2. For those photographers editing an image that requires a transparent background, PNG if the answer as a file format to save your images.
  3. For animation, just in case you are curious, save your image as a GIF.
  4. Most avid and professional photographers will shoot in RAW. RAW is an uncompressed large image best for editing and achieving great results. Once edited, the image can be saved as a JPEG or TIFF or PNG.

”It is all about size”

  1. Make sure you know where you are planning to upload your images. A safe bet would be to google the image size required for the device or website beforehand. It is also just as important to be aware of the proportion – portrait, landscape or square before you proceed, as websites and social platforms often differ.
  2. Avoid trying to upload a small sized image that you have made larger, as this will result negatively in terms of quality – pixeled and blurry.
  3. If you need to check the size of one of your images on your computer, simply right click on the images and go to “get info’ where you will see size of your image before your start the process.
  4. There are many different size options on websites when uploading images, this will depend on use of the image in terms of placement on the site. The largest option size is normally referred to as a full-page image, followed by a header image. It is important to clarify this before you resize and upload to the website. Failing this will result in the image not fitting correctly in the allocated space. Remember that most websites have different themes when they are built as templates.

Most Popular Editing Software for Optimizing your Images

First on my list a is Adobe Photoshop, unfortunately this is not a free option, but works well when resizing the image and is easy to use. This is definitely a great editing software package to learn and use for editing your photographs.

Free options that are highly rated are GIMP and ImageOptim for Mac and PC users. There are others but these are the ones that I have used and managed to rate in a positive way.

Finally, you can put your compression method to the test through using the free speed check tool on Google which provides you with the loading times to your website page.

I trust the tips I have provided will be useful and avoid disappointment when it comes to quality of compressed images as well as your upload speeds for website SEO performance.