Determining the correct size of an image to use on your website can be tricky. Your website probably has a standard image size setting, and if you learn to size your images correctly your users will have a quality visual experience and a pleasant browsing experience.
The first thing you need to understand about website images is that no two web designers use the same terminology. Some designers will ask the "size" of an image when they want to know the pixel dimensions as they appear in the web browser; whereas the "size" for someone else actually refers to the kilobyte size of the file saved on the hard drive.
Jewelry photography is very difficult. You won't sell anything online or attract attention to your store if your photos are too small to see detail, of if the images are too grainy. Grainy images are also referred to as low resolution.
You will have to experiment in your graphics program using the crop tool, the canvas tool, and the compression quality (also referred to as the color depth).
For all jewelry photography, you should:
1. Crop out as much white space around the jewelry item as possible.
2. Resize the image to the pixel dimensions needed for your website, not larger and not smaller.
3. Test several compression settings to discover the minimum setting possible without losing detail.
Using the program Adobe PhotoShop, you can easily test your compression settings before saving the final image for the web. We've found this PhotoShop feature to be indispensable when cropping and resizing hundreds of jewelry photos.
When a website runs slowly, the first thing we look at is the kilobyte size of the images. More kilobytes means longer time to download. Taking time to crop extraneous white space and tighten up your compressions is the first step in speeding up your own website.
