Resizing Pictures for your Webpages Ok, you've just taken the most fantastic picture with your new digital camera and you want to put it on display for all the world to see. There's only one small problem..... actually it's not a small problem, it's a big one. The picture itself is far too big to display on a webpage, it takes ages for the page to load and you're concerned that you'll lose your very valuable visitors, particularly those who are on a dialup 56k modem, your page may be taking a minute or more to load on their computers. You are right to be concerned, it's a well known fact that most casual browsers will give your page minimum time to load. If it doesnt load relatively quickly....... *Poof!* They're gone... probably never to return. Can we do anything about it? 'course we can, we just need to resize the image and you might be surprised to find that it's a whole lot simpler than you might have thought possible.

Reducing your Picture Size

Is your picture too big? How big is too big? There are no hard and fast rules as to picture sizes, as a general guide though, your page should load quickly while still showing off your pictures at their best. I find that as a general rule, I try and have my full size pictures no bigger than 500 pixels wide and 500 pixels high. This means that your visitor gets to see the whole pic without having to scroll up and down or from side to side. Remember this is only a guide, you may need to make some pictures larger than that especially if you need to show specific details in different parts of an image.

You can see two thumbnails below, they are both linked to the exact same picture, the difference is that the pic on the left has been reduced in size whilst the one on the right has not. Click on the image to the left and you'll see a full size pic showing all the necessary detail with no scrolling required. The dimensions are 500 x 434 and the filesize is less than 30 kilobytes which is excellent for a full size picture. Now what about the thumbnail on the right, if you click on that and open the full size pic, what do you get? It's way too big I'm sure you agree. You've got to scroll up and down and side to side to see the full size, plus it's gonna take ages to load for any visitor who is using a dialup modem because the filesize is 125 kilobytes. My sincere apologies to anybody who just clicked on the picture and who are still waiting for it to load.

Resize a Picture step by step