Technical Tips

Product photography image optimisation

The finished photographic images we supply to you are normally your master files. They will likely have a large file size, as they will be supplied at our highest quality and resolution settings. They may need to be optimised depending on how you intend to use them.

Back them up - The first thing you should always do before you optimise your original master image files, is back them up by making a copy and storing it somewhere such as a cloud storage service like Drop Box or on a DVD or portable hard drive at a different physical address.

Image size - Careful consideration should be given to the largest image size viewable on your website. Big is not always better. Just because a monitor screen may be capable of showing a very large picture dose not mean you should fill it.

You need to consider the normal viewing distance of the monitor, as your web site visitor is unlikely to thank you for making them scroll their eyes around a 27” screen to view your product photography images or having to scroll the image because its to large to fit on their laptop screen.

Do some testing using different devices, try starting with an image size of around 800px and then adjust larger and smaller to find a balance between page load speed (smaller size is better), what you find a comfortable size for a normal viewing distance of around 40 - 80cm and what also works well with your web sites design and layout.

Check your web page load speed - Visitors to your website will want and expect your site to deliver it’s content quickly, and will soon leave if your web pages load slowly due to badly optimised images. Slow pages may also lead to search engines penalising your sites ranking.

Load speed - You can easily check the load speed of you pages individual elements in Google, including all your images, by entering you web page URL here:

https://developers.google.com/speed/page speed/insights/

Then optimise your page as much as you can by following the resulting Google instructions.

When adding product photography and packshot images to your website some software applications automatically resize the images to fit the allocated spaces on your web pages. This may make life easy but it is an inappropriate way of adding product photography content to your web page.

The software application will likely be resizing your large images using html code every time someone loads your page. This could significantly slow down your page load speed.

Avoid slow page loading by ensuring you resize your product photography and packshot images to the pixel dimensions they will ultimately be displayed at before you add them to your web page. See blog post regarding ‘automatically resizing your images’.