Happy Halloween. . . and a BLEG for Picture Advice
I hope you all had a happy halloween! We had a great time following Boo around and trying to keep him from diving at every candy bowl he saw with two hands. . .
Anyway, this post is meant to make you smile. But also: I’m looking for some advice!
I would like to have put this picture up bigger and with better resolution. But even cut down to 280 pixel width and degraded to 66% quality as a JPEG, it still has a load time of 2 seconds.
I see large, clear pictures on other sites. But I can’t find any info on how to do that and keep my load time down.
For example: look down at the post on the football championship. Those pictures had so much detail in them that they were showing load times of over 10 seconds. So that’s why they look so terrible — I had to just keep making them smaller and cutting the quality to get them anywhere near tolerable load times.
I use Macromedia’s Fireworks to edit and compress the pics. I’ve tried compressing in the Microsoft Office Picture Manager program, but don’t get any better results there.
Can anyone help?
I’m not any sort of expert, but you could store two images on your host, a smaller low-res image and a larger one. Then, put the “img” tag pointing at the smaller image and surround that with an anchor “a href=” tag to the larger one. That way those with slower connections don’t pull in the larger picture, but those who wish can.
My suggestion would be to get a flickr account. The basic account is free and you can probably post directly to your blog. Flickr will automatically resize your photo for the initial posting, then link back to the original.
Your images are not very large at all (in bytes). How about the DPI setting? Make sure you’re between 72 and 96. Also, maybe the issue has to do with the settings you are using at MT to load the images onto your posts?