Suggestions on saving for web size vs. quality

[BigFuzzy]

Hola everyone,

The issue I have is this: What ways do you all save your final images for use on the web.

What I'd like to do is have a 1200x800pxl (or so) at the best quality vs size ratio.

So, what do you guys do? Do you do it in PS or LR or some other specialized software?

Any/all suggestions appreciated as I'm considering a website redo and want larger images used but don't want to slow things down any more.. (my sites been acting slow, so I'm doing a whole revamp soon).

Thanks!

Al

[sybren]

I use a batch queue in Bibble Pro to export the RAW + all the changes I made to it, to a JPEG file 1000px on its long side. It then sends it to Flickr for publication.

If your website is getting slow, consider hosting your photos on Flickr and displaying them on your website from there. Be sure to adhere to the TOS and you should be fine.

[wulf]

I save them for me or, in many cases, use them unedited. I upload to Flickr and let them take care of online hosting and resizing.

If you want to host the images yourself you can experiment. I have found that, using the GIMP, I can take quality down to about 90% without visible degradation. In fact, you can ramp it down much further than that in some cases. A particular point to note is that different images are more or less compressible; if you wanted to use a batch process, it would be best to output at a range of compression levels and then manually determine which to use in each case.

If your site is running slowly, what you really need to do is identify where the bottlenecks are. Is it really the images or could it be something like an included ********** that is turning things to treacle?

Wulf

[wannabephotographer]

It's probably not your pictures. More likely it's where you're hosting your site. Perhaps look into upgrading that since you are redoing the site anyway.

[BigFuzzy]

Thanks for the suggestions.

It was my impression that hosting on flickr and linking to there is actually slower than hosting on your own site.. am I wrong in that? I'd totally be ok with that if the consensus is that it's faster...?

[wulf]

It depends on the speed of your site. Flickr gives a pretty good response time although every additional site your pages depend on creates a vulnerability when those external servers go down. Again, Flickr is reliable and I'm happy to use it for the purposes of my blog. YMMV.

Wulf