How to prepare pictures for your website

Before you add pictures to your Media Library you need to ensure that you have cropped and re-sized them first.

When you take a picture on a digital camera, for example, the image dimensions are usually much larger than you will want on your website. The filesize (how many kilobytes or megabytes your picture is) will also be much larger than it needs to be. This would result in a slow download time for your web visitors if you placed this image straight onto your website.

To prepare your pictures you will need photo-editing software on your computer and some basic knowledge of how to use it. If you do not have any photo-editing software we would recommend Adobe Photoshop Elements as a good, reasonable-cost, commercial product. Though, of course, many other similar products are available.

The first step in preparing your picture for your website is to re-size its dimensions.
The specific instructions on how to change the size of your image will vary depending on the software you are using. Look for an ‘Image Size...’ option in the menu.

What size should I make my picture?
This will depend largely on where on your page you are placing the picture and how much room there is for it. A good way of figuring out the size you need is to use the size of an existing picture as a guide. Or you can ask us here at WhiteInteractive for some guidance.

Can I change the picture size within re:write?
Yes, you can scale an image using the picture properties window, however the image quality will not be quite as good using this technique as it will be if you resize the image in photo-editing software.

Once you have edited your photo to the correct dimensions you need to save it in JPG format. No other formats are allowed in the re:write picture library.

When saving as a JPG image you may have an option to adjust the quality settings of the picture. The higher the quality is set the longer it will take to download so you need to decide on which quality setting best suits your need. A setting of 80% is a good compromise between quality and download times.