Image Size
Looking around various blogs the other day led me to start thinking about image size for posting in blogs. All my images are presented with a maximum length of 600px. I have chosen this as a compromise between viewability, file size and abilirty to fit on the screen. It is noticeable that a lot of people are moving to 700px maximum length now and some of these images certainly do have more impact. The problem I have is that when they are either square or portrait, they are difficult to get complete onto the screen of my laptop - I have to flip into fullscreen mode. The tabs on Firefox are a problem in this area. On my home pc there is no problem, butI am often away and use my laptop for viewing blogs.
There are a variety of smaller images - when I used blogger as a home, my images were posted at 500px which was the default produced when posting out of Flickr. The standard was, I think, 400px which in my view is far too small to see well.
Do you have a view on this - do let me know.
October 14th, 2005 at 12:33 pm
When I was developing my photoblog site I had to consider what size to post images at. I decided on 800px wide (rather than limit by length). This was because I figured most people would be using at least 800×600 resolution (I guess the same reason you went for 600px length?). However, I figure that most people use something greater (at least 1024×768) now, as even the cheapest 15″ LCDs do that, so I’m quite happy I decided to go with the larger size (I was considering something smaller). As I work on 1920×1200 it can be quite easy to want to design stuff too large!
October 14th, 2005 at 1:02 pm
It seems like 600 is a nice average size to post. I admit that I keep trying to click on some of your photos to enlarge and see the finer detail, which always tosses me back to the previous days post. But I’m not sure that means your photos aren’t posted large enough, just that I’m a sucker for the texture and detail. I dislike having to reposition my screen everytime I click on a sight just to get the photo in frame. My own posts vary…depending on subject, number and generally whim.
October 14th, 2005 at 7:30 pm
I standardized my blog and portfolio around 600pix on it’s longest length. This is usually plenty big for viewing, small enough to retain great quality while keeping download times to a minimum.
If I remember correctly, I started blogging on my-expressions with images 700pix wide, and I got a lot of complaints that they were too big and took too long to download. I then moved to 600 and never got another size complaint. My images are 50-150k depending on B&W or color and how much detail is in the image. My target size is 100k.
I’ve often thought about gonig back to 700 wide, but I work on a small display (12″ laptop) and 600 really is comfortable. The new mint statistics software confirmed that I’m not alone. The 1024×768 resolution is used by over 60% of the visitors to my site, not counting me.
Dave
October 14th, 2005 at 9:21 pm
hmmm - hadn’t really thought about this. I generally use 700pix as this seems to be a nice size on my screen. I am a bit spoilt as I have a 19″ LCD at work, and my laptop at home is 15″ with a good resolution…
i have posted bigger over the last week - notably the b&w landscape, just because it looked so much better big! In hindsight though I guess it was not very considerate, although I have not had a complaint so far.
I think 700pix is fine though, and will try and stick to that in future :p
October 16th, 2005 at 1:03 am
I’ve been posting 640×480 which long ago was a standard for designing websites to fit on 14″ screens. I also don’t like to have to scroll so much that you loose the impact of the photo. My last posting was at 500px long. I’m experimenting a bit with size–I find it might be too small to be evotive, but I’ve also started selling some of my picts. Well, at least they are being accepted–haven’t sold any yet, and don’t want them to be so big that someone would steal them and used them on their projects. That would be copyright infrigement but that’s a whole other topic.
October 16th, 2005 at 3:23 pm
Whatever works for the photographer is fine with me, but I do prefer larger images for viewing because of my older eyes.
October 16th, 2005 at 3:33 pm
It was a tough decision for me to make when I designed my site. I’m currently using 800px wide. It’s too big for 800X600 screen resolutions, but I reasoned that people interested in photography would most likely use 1024X768 minimum. I later noticed that 700px is the probably the best size for 1024X768. Maybe I’ll start uploading 700px wide photos.
October 17th, 2005 at 3:48 am
mine..i had lots of picture to load on the blog
so i always go for a rather small size…where if you r interested, then click on it and the next page is a larger version…
so tht it will be easy to load…or else it take years to load the entire page on those broadband-less pc
November 30th, 2005 at 9:40 pm
I wonder if many of the people who browse photoblogs on a regular basis are doing so at higher then average resolutions as is their nature. Therefore, you could argue for posting larger photos.