It is VERY important that you optimize your images. You want all of your images to display at 100% of their intended size. You can use the Image Wizard to compress the photo but this only reduces the image size and not the file size. What is the difference? An optimized image will display very quickly and will display at 100% of its intended size. A compressed image can take a long time to appear on a website since the amount of data is being squeezed into a smaller area than intended. The slower the web visitors Internet connection, the longer it will take an image that is not optimized to display on the monitor.
You can optimize your images using an image editor like Photoshop, Photoshop Elements, Picasa, which is free, or any other image editor that you choose.
To learn about optimizing images using Photoshop or Photoshop Elements, please download this guide.
Picasa is a free download from Google that you can download at http://picasa.google.com.
Here is a quick guide to using Picasa:
To reduce the image resolution (pixel count) and .jpg compression (image quality) of your photos using the Export feature, just follow these steps:
Step 1
Open Picasa and select your image. Then press the Export button.
Step 2
Click Browse to locate the folder where the optimized image will be saved.
Step 3
Under 'Image Size Options' select the Resize To button and adjust the slider. Note that the number of pixels you select with this slider determines the length or height of your photo (whichever is longer). The other dimension is determined automatically to maintain the aspect ratio of the photo.
Step 4
Select the desired image quality for your photo using the Image Quality drop-down menu:
'Automatic' preserves the original image quality
'Normal' balances quality and size
'Maximum' preserves fine detail for large file sizes
'Minimum' yields some quality loss for small file sizes
'Custom' enables you to select your own value. A value of 60 is our recommended setting.
Step 5 Click OK
The optimized image size is now 15 KB, which is a great size for the web. Anything under 50 KB for a standard size image of 4 inches (288 pixels) is acceptable. The original size was almost 9 times as large as you can see in the screenshot below, which is way too large for any web page.
