Criticial Understanding – Image Downsampling

It is important to downsample images before using them for my blog, or any other website. This is because most websites will compress the images using very lossy compression, so on top of uploading images that are 8MB each, the images look worse, and take longer.

DSLR cameras capture images at extremely high resolution, in my case 4928x3264. I am going to downsample these images before uploading them to the blog. They will also make managing the PowerPoint presentation much easier as there is less wasted image data.

Here is the export dialogue and settings. notice how I have set the resizing to use the long edge of the image, and limited that to 1024 px. Sometimes 2048 px is neccesary but for most web purposes 1024 is the most suitable size. There is absolutely no reason to be uploading full size, uncompressed images to the web as it is badly optimized and some users will struggle to load the website.

The end result? my images have been compressed from 9MB to around 800KB. this is approx 9x smaller in file size, costing mobile users less data and helping users with slow internet speeds to access the content faster. This is good practice in all cases, especially in my visual storyboard. There is negligible loss of image quality if images are downsized correctly. If anything, the images look better. This is because the pixel density is being increased and the pixels are getting smaller, meaning less noise is visible in the image as a result of it's compression. Blurry areas are less apparent and the image appears sharper.