99.99999999% of websites out there use images on them. This is good. A picture paints a thousand words, etc.
But there is a little problem that is becoming bigger and bigger. It is the issue of camera resolutions. The average camera today can take a photo big enough to cover a small coffee table! What this means is that you have your photo of your new product you are selling and you upload it to your website, then you view it. What happens now is that most websites that handle imagery will shrink the photo but as the page loads it will load a ‘coffee table sized’ photo but show the photo at the size you specified. Or, your photo will be displayed in a small ‘area’ but, again, the whole photo will be downloading onto the page.
Let’s make the above paragraph simple. Pages will take longer to load, some of them will be horrifically slow. You will take up heaps of room on your server and if your website is image heavy then you could exceed your memory quota just on images.
Some important notes on slow page loading times. One thing that will happen is that visitors to your site will not wait for the page loading – I don’t, I get fed up and think the company must be unprofessional! Also, Google and the other search engines don’t wait for slow pages either! They have to crawl billions of web pages so they only dedicate a tiny amount of time to a page before they move on.
So, we have a problem, let us now look at the solution. And… the solution is ‘image resizing’.
- Some software that comes with the camera you have might have resizing capabilities.
- There are many programs that can be downloaded from the ‘net. Some of these are free but they keep asking you to buy the main product to ‘unlock’ additional features.
- Then there are also graphics manipulation programs like Adobe, Paint Shop Pro and Gimp that all can alter image dimensions to a certain degree of quality.
I use a free program call VSO Image Resizer 4. It is a nice little package but there are some negative reviews about it due to its lack of various features. It’s free ….. what more do you want?
Here is where you can officially download it from – VSO I R 4 – and there is also a positive review of it as well.
