Image Guidelines

There are several ways to optimize your images for web. We will go over three of them here.

1) Resolution/dpi:
Dpi stands for dots per inch. Most images that are downloaded from a digital camera or scanner have a resolution of 200 - 600 dpi. That is too large for use on a website; your photos should be resized prior to uploading to your site. 72 dpi is the optimal resolution for web use.  Open your image editing program (Photoshop, Corel, or Paint Shop) and change your image resolution / DPI to 72 dpi. If you don’t know how to do this open your image editing program, click on “help” and do a “search” for “resolution” or “DPI”. This is much easer that is sounds and usually there are only 2 to 3 steps to resizing images in most image editing programs. I you can’t figure it out please contact your account representative.
Recap: 72 to 96 dpi but no higher.

2) Dimensions: This is the length and width of the image measured in pixels. (Dots on the screen) Most small images you see on the web are 100 – 200 pixels wide and 200 – 300 high. This is a good size for a small image to be placed on a webpage. If you want a lager picture to show off a product or to show detail a lager images should be used. A large size image should never be larger that 500 wide by 700 high. Images larger than that will take many people on slower internet connections to long to download the image. You may discourage people from using your site in the future. See samples below Recap: 200 to 500 pixels wide is the optimal size.

200 pixels Wide, 72dpi

3) File size:
This is measured in kb or MB a 1mb file is equal to 1,000 kb. If your image is over 1mb it's way too big. Open your image editing program (Photoshop, Corel, or Paint Shop) and resize your image to an appropriate size. The smaller the better, try to keep file size under 100 kb. Images any larger than that will take to long to download.
Recap: Under 150 kb is the optimal file size.

Here are some examples of common sizes and dpi. Images courtesy of where-eagles-soar. If you would like some stock photography please visit http://www.where-eagles-soar.com they have great stock photography at reasonable prices.