I was excited to open the email message from the photographer for my client’s website. I’d been waiting for photos for their site for a couple weeks.
My client wanted to photograph outside, for a more natural look. And the weather had not been cooperating. Thankfully, the last few days had been sunny, calm, and warm.
I’d already received the staff photos a few weeks earlier, and they were great looking shots. I knew the additional photos would be high quality photos.
In the email was the link to the photographer’s Dropbox account. I selected the link, visited Dropbox, and viewed the thumbnails of the photos. They looked fantastic!
But I noticed something wasn’t quite right with the photos.
Maybe the thumbnails weren’t displaying correctly?
So, I selected a file download link and waited for one of the files to download to my computer. And waited.
And waited.
Was my connection slow? Why was the file taking so long to download?
And that’s when I noticed the second odd thing: the size of the file.
It wasn’t the five to six megabyte file size that the previous staff photos were; it was over 30 megabytes (MB) in size.
Yikes!
Not what I expected. And I had several more 30MB+ files from the photographer to download.
How to Get the Photos You Need for Your Website
For your website, you want to have visually appealing and high quality photos to attract visitors and prospective customers.
You’ve heard it before, a picture is worth a thousand words.
But you want to make sure you get the most out of your website photos. You’ll want your photos to be optimized, sized correctly, and framed in the best way possible.
Here’s three tips to make that happen:
1. Talk with your photographer about file size
I’m not talking about the width and height of the photo, I’m talking about the file size in a computer drive or folder.
Do you need a 30MB file for a photo that will be resized to less than 100K-300K on a website? Typically not.
Photos are one of the main factors affecting website speed performance; you want photos to be optimized so they load quickly.
Discuss file sizes with the photographer before the shoot; let them know what you expect.
2. Frame photos with extra space
Why would you want extra space? Because the photo will be resized and cropped to fit on the website pages.
You don’t want to have a feature cropped away, or have to do an additional photo shoot to capture that key element you wanted to be included in a photo.
3. Shoot photos in landscape and portrait format
Having a variety of shots allows your web designer to have a good selection of photos to choose from for your site.
It’s a lot easier for your web designer to work with different formats, than to be limited to only use landscape or portrait photos.
Hopefully these tips will help you get the right photos that can be used on your website.
Do you have any other tips to share about photos for website? Share them in the comments.
Great tips, Deborah.
I completely agree. It’s important for the designer and photographer to discuss not only creative direction – but file requirements. And when it comes to staff photos, background color and framing (head/shoulder room) are key topics that must be discussed.
Thanks again!
Hi Cam,
Thanks for your comment. Something that can be easily overlooked, especially when there’s a tight deadline or content has been delayed for weeks, or months. Appreciate your tips on staff photos.They’re always interesting for my projects, because someone is usually missing the day of photo shoot. And trying to reschedule is challenging. Have you had that happen?