Using Photos And Images

     Of the coolest things you can do to break up the monotony of a website is to add graphics.  It is also one of the misunderstood.  While pictures, graphics, cool backgrounds and animated images can bring a website to life, large image files can slow down the time it takes your web page to load, and your visitors may leave your site before your website fully loads.  Large image files will also use up more bandwidth, and free websites usually offer a limited amount of bandwidth.  If you need free image hosting to save bandwidth:  CLICK HERE.

     The first thing you should do is use a photo editing program to resize your photos.  A good rule of thumb is to keep your photos 400 pixels wide or smaller.  (If you have a newer digital camera, your photos may be 3 or 4 times that big right out of the camera.)  This makes for a huge file size and a file size that big is only valuable if you are printing posters. Large files also are a problem to send in email. Do not just click on the image after it is on your website and "drag" it smaller.  This does NOT reduce the file size and may distort the image. If you are putting more than 3 photos on a webpage you may even want to go smaller.
     Photographs generally have a .jpeg or .jpg extension which means a photo on your computer will look similar to "mydog.jpg".  There are free photo editing programs available that do a very good job resizing your photos.  I recommend IrfanView (be sure to download the free plug-ins too!)

Using IrfanView To Resize Photos

     After you have downloaded and installed IrfanView, open the program and click on "File" at the top left and choose "Open".  You can then browse your computer for your photos.  Click on your desired photo and click "Open".  Now click on "Image" at the top and choose "Resize/Resample".  The window will tell you current size of the image, and you can type in your desired width in the "Width" box.  The height box will automatically change to retain your photo's "constraints", this is ok. (You can unclick "Preserve aspect ratio" to enter both dimensions.)  After entering your new dimensions, click "OK".  Your image will now appear in a new window for further modification.  When you are done, click "File" and choose "Save As" so you do not overwrite your original photo.  Create a new folder, rename your newly resized image and click "Save".

Compressing  Photos

     Now that you have resized your photos, you have reduced the file size, but there is one more step you need to do to make your photos web-friendly.  You can "compress" your photos and reduce the file size sometimes in half.  This is a hard to find free program called "Ken Ward's Makeup". It is only 675kb and contains no spyware. To download it free, CLICK HERE.

Using Ken Ward's Makeup To Compress Photos

     After downloading and installing, here is how to compress your photos with Ken Ward's Makeup to compress your photos.  Click on "File" then "Open".  You can then browse your computer, click on the desired photo and click "Open".  Click  the "Save" icon at the top. In the new window under the right image you will see a slide button you can drag to compress your photo.  Move the slide to the left to about "50" and "JPEG Compression Quality" will turn red.  To see what your image will look like that at compression rate click the "button with 3 dots" . If the picture does not look too bad, you could slide to the left and compress a little more, or if it looks bad, you could slide to the right and compress a little less.  Click the 3 dot button to see what your new compression rate looks like.  When you are done, click  "Save As" so you do not overwrite your original photo.  Create a new folder, rename your newly compressed image and click "Save".

     You can also use a great photo compression program called "Riot". It is a free download of an easy to use program and it is only 973 kb. You can download it free HERE.

More online photo editing programs

Compressing Gif And Animated Images

     Some images have a .gif file extension are commonly called GIF's.  These are mostly the cool small animated images everybody likes, but they cannot be compressed with a regular photo editor like the ones above.  The only free place online I have found to reduce the file size of these images is a cool website called MyImager.com. You can reduce the file size of a GIF image by reducing the amount of colors needed. Sometimes you can save up to 90%! Upload the GIF then under optimize, click "colors". Then enter the number of colors needed.