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Images

Suggestions for page developement, sizing, and efficiency!

Your image could be one of the most important aspects of your webpage.

Being the first item your viewer takes notice of, the size, placement, and visual stimulation is what will lead to further investigation of your text, product, or service. The image should be sized in such a manner as to load as quickly as possible, yet be large enough to invite additional viewing of your website.

Size, sharpness, color-correctness and composition all contribute to the viewer's perception of image quality. An additional factor is the time it takes to place the image before the viewer - which is determined by the physical size of the file (kilobytes) and the bandwidth of the viewer's connection.

A good friend and expert on image manipulation, eBay user NKTower, has formulated instructive and concise information on these topics. The approach taken in his tutorials may be found below. Full credit is given for the innumerable hours he spent in the documenting the process he uses for preparing images.

Download time for an image is proportional to the size of the file, which is measured in 'bytes' or 'kilobytes' (KB).

The size of the file is determined by four factors:

The width of the image, measured in pixels (dots on the screen,)
The height of the image, measured in pixels
The number of distinct colors
The amount of repetition of colors in the image.

You have the ability to directly control the first three of the four factors. At a minimum, you want to understand how to:

crop the image to remove unnecessary background or foreground areas around the image. There is no rule that says that you must have a standard "4 by 5" or "5 by 7" ratio.
resize the image to make use of a large area of the viewer's screen so that detail will be visible, and yet not spill over the boundaries of the viewable area of the screen.
compress the image by making subtle reductions in the number of distinct colors in the image which will greatly reduce the size of the image file. Look in the manual or HELP menu section of the image editing software that came with your digital camera or scanner for instructions on using the crop and resize tools. They are usually well explained, and you can see the effect of the change(s) as you apply them.

If you do not feel comfortable with the image editing software that came with your camera or scanner, you might look here: IrfanView for a tool that provides basic Crop, Resize and Compress functionality. IrfanView is a very nice, straight-forward image editing program that is a free download for non-commercial use. As of 09/28/2005, the current version is 3.97, it is only about 600KB, so it will not take a long time to download even on a dial-up connection. The separate "plug-ins" may also be downloaded, but aren't required for basic functionality.

NKTower's tutorials were originally designed for assisting eBay members auction submission, but are pertinent to any web page. The collection of tutorials consists of step-by-step instruction on using IrfanView, notes on file size versus compression, and tips on photographing small and/or hard to light objects.

Using a 3, 4, or 5 megapixel camera will generate an image that is physically way too large for the average screen. It is wonderful if you want to make a print image, but no one wants to see only the upper 1/4 of the image on their screen and have to scroll horizontally and vertically to see portions of the entire image.

Our recommendation for final picture to be submitted (if you have an editor), to EZRUS, via email is an approximate size of less than 50 KB's in total. This, depending on placement may further be reduced in size for your site benefit, by EZRUS personel. A most productive size would be 15 KB's.

Below are pictures as examples: The first 3 will open up in separate windows to give you the feel of extreme size, and longer loading times for your visitor.
Original size uncropped. #1)at 127 kb's-click here

#2 Image resized about 50% after cropping at 57 kb's click here #3 good at 26 kb's click here

#4 better at 10 kb's

# 5 at 7 kb's

or somewhere between these three.