Working with Images

Make your Web Pages Display Faster

Make your Image File Size Smaller

Until everyone has a super-fast connection to the Internet, how small you can make your files can make the difference between whether your visitors stay or leave.

Making your pictures physically smaller by resizing and cropping them is a good first start. Compressing them further as you export them finishes the job.

A good graphics program uses a compression scheme to throw away some of the information in your images, but saves just enough so that the images look good.

The result is a smaller file size, which means that your images take less time to download.

This is sometimes referred to as "Image Optimization."

Compare the two images above. There's not much difference between them, but notice that the file size has been reduced from 118948 bytes (118.9K) to 7251 bytes (7K).

Here the compression is set at 20%. (In PhotoPaint, click on the Preview button to see the results of the compression.)

In the images below, notice that the cars and the building in the image on the right are blurry and indistinct.

The image on the left is the original, and the one on the right is 70% compressed. The resulting file size is a terrific 3K, but the quality is unacceptably poor.