Re-sizing images for faster loading

[dtp134]

I want to thank anyone and everyone here on the sitepoint forums. You have all helped me a lot in the development and deployment of my site (www.universityneuromuscularmassage.com for anyone that is interested). I have noticed that the slideshow I have at the top of my pages takes quite some time to load. Is there an easy way to resize the original picture file (without losing too much quality) so all images load faster? Thanks.

[Rubble]

One of your images I checked is 3970px x 3500px and it probably only needs to be something like 200px x 200px

Any graphics program on your PC can be used to resize them prior to upload.

[dresden_phoenix]

Holly------------!!!!!!

Yes a lot of these images, have high enough resolution that you can use them for printing billboards. A good way to determine the appropiate resolution is to figure what % of the page they will cover.

So if you have a site that's about 960px wide and you want each photo to be wide enough to cover 2/3 of that then you must reduce all your images to be 640px.

as said before this can easily be done in any RASTER graphics program , such as Gimp or Photoshop, even ...gasp.. Paint.

however , Photoshop does have a neat trick. You can RECORD an ACTION ( look for the action palette), while reducing and toning each image to your desired size, EXPORT that action as a DROPLET. Then you can just DRAG and DROP ALL your IMAGES to the droplet and they wil be resized to that exact size as the first one. This saves both time and keeps your work consistent!

WARNING , make sure to save a back up of the original images.

Hope that helps.

[dtp134]

Thanks guys. Yes, they are high resolution. They are the same images I have used for some print and flash based ads. I have photoshop, but not entirely comfortable using it. I will have to look into the action, droplet thing. Again, I LOVE SITEPOINT!

[Rubble]

As you only have a few images it might just be as easy to open in Photoshop and then use "save for web". There are videos on how to do this when searching Google.

[pushkarawal]

You should use different images according to needss. Avoid resizing images as much as possible. You can resize images using microsoft picture manager.
To reduce image file size you can also use image compressor which makes image lighter. I mostly use "xnview" to compress image.

[system]

sorry if I'm interrupting as I'm too developing my own site and due to same image size it's taking long stretched time to get upload but going through your discussion here I've a got a clue about how to fix the trouble .. thanks.

[StevenHu]

Please don't use huge files like that. Optimize your photos for the web, because people pay for mobile bandwidth. They must pay for all the time it takes to download your huge image that provides no useful information. Those users will never come back.

It will be well worth your time to learn to resize an image in Gimp (a free program) at least. And it's pretty easy to resize, too: open the image, choose the image reducing size you want, and save as a new image (you want to keep the original image).

[system]