Tips For Professional Photography

There is a fine balance between taking amazing quality photos and being able to use that photography online on your website without optimizing the images for the web.

The best photographs are large and high quality, but if you publish these data heavy images on your site then you will slow down your page load speed so much that Google will consider you to be too slow to rank well and consequently, no one will ever find your beautiful photos.

Large, unoptimized images can be 12 – 25 Mb each, which are massive in website terms.

Web Photography Tips

Most websites are optimized for a maximum screen size of 1200 pixels wide, which is plenty for all current wide screen formats. However, large file size images straight out of your camera can be 5000 – 8000 pixels wide depending on the quality settings you have.

For some uses, large files like these are necessary, but for web use, there is far too much data in each image which won’t make your image display any better, but will just take longer to load.

Every element and item on your web page has to be fetched from your hosting server to the device that has requested the page. The speed that the loading process takes is governed by how large your files are and how your code is written and presented.

Photography & Image Compression

Using images doesn’t need to have a negative impact on your websites performance. If you reduce the file size of your images by reducing the dimentions of each image, you will begin the process of speeding up your load speed.

Once you have images that are 1000 – 1200 pixels wide (you can use smaller images for publication on mobile phones and tablets with responsive design), which will make your site even faster to load.

Finally, use G Zip compression to compress all of the code on your website. This will allow your site to load as fast as possible and display your photography in all its glory.