Optimize Photos for a Photographer Website

The photography industry is a competitive one. It doesn’t matter if you’re a professional photographer or just starting out – it’s so important to make sure that your photos are optimized for the best possible quality and speed when they’re uploaded to your website. In this blog post, we’ll show you how to optimize photos for a photographer website.

Resizing your images

You can’t go wrong with resizing your images to the maximum width you will use them at. This ensures that your image will look good in all of its various scenarios and is also a quick way to make sure that the width is optimized for SEO.

Resizing images can be done in Photoshop and Lightroom, but not all photographers have access to these programs. If you don’t have access to Adobe products, there are many free tools available online that can help you resize and optimize your photos without the need for expensive software.

Keep in mind responsiveness when resizing. If you are going to be using an image as a banner on your website, you need to size it to a much larger pixel size so that on large screens it doesn’t appear blurry. On the flip side, there is no reason to size your about image to 3000px wide. Drop that sucker down to 600px (or smaller depending on the design) and save yourself load time.

Save in the right format and resolution

You want to optimize photos for a photographer website for people to view on their phone, tablet, or laptop. JPEG is the best format for photos because it compresses them so they don’t take up too much space. PNG is also a good option for logos; its transparent backgrounds make it easy to overlap in design and on your website. GIFs are great for animated images—if you have an animated logo in your logo set, save that as an animated GIF!

There are different resolutions your images can be in. Most likely the settings from your camera will be at least 300 DPI (resolution). This is the standard for printing. It’s basically saying there are 300 dots per inch of your photo. For press, this keeps details. But for web 300 DPI is far too high. In fact, 72 DPI is the standard for online images since screens don’t output at 300 DPI. If 72 ever feels a little too low quality wise, since many screens are high def now, drop your images down to 150 DPI at the size you need them to. This alone will lower the file size significantly.

Convert images to the web-safe color profile (sRGB)

It’s important to use a photo program to convert images to the web-safe color profile (sRGB). This is the color profile that is displayed on computer screens. Cameras normally save formats in CMYK, which is the standard for printing. You’ll need to swap the color profile so that your images display accurately on the web.

Compress images to optimize

When you upload images to your website, you want to make sure they look their best and that they don’t take forever to load. You want to make sure that the files are as small and efficient as possible. A great way to do both of these things is by using a lossless compression algorithm, such as JPEG quality or PNG. Compression algorithms reduce file size without sacrificing any detail or clarity in the image itself. You can do this when exporting the file in Photoshop, Lightroom, or whatever photo software you have. I would recommend dropping it do to the 70% range. This will lower the file size without lowering your image quality.

Once you’ve exported your images following the instructions above you’ll want to further optimize your image and reduce the file size. There are some great tools out there to assist you with this!

1 TINYPNG is an online site that will compress your images while retaining the quality. You can upload either PNG or JPG and even upload 20 images at a time. If you subscribe to their pro (which I believe is $25/year) you can upload unlimited images at a time. Great for blog posts or gallery updates.

2 JPEG Mini is similar to the one I just listed. There is even a plugin for Lightroom if you get the pro version!

3 If your site is on WordPress there are a variety of image optimization plug-ins. A few you can look into are: Imagify, ImageRecylce, EWWW Image Optimizer, Kragen, WP Smush.

Optimize photos for a photographer website so it loads quickly and boosts your rank

When you optimize photos for a photographer website, you can boost your SEO. What photographer doesn’t want better SEO rankings? In 2010 Google announced that speed was a factor when ranking sites.

The most important thing is to make sure that your images are optimized for the web. That means they must be compressed and resized, so they load fast and look great on all devices. The faster your load time, the longer people will stay on your site. It’s important to improve the overall experience users have which will help increase your conversion rate.

You can see more tips on optimizing your photos in this post.