Image Editing 101

Online photo-sharing tips

Before you share a photo online, there are a few final changes you may want to make to ensure your photos look as good as possible. These changes will also help to optimize your photos for web viewing.

Save as JPEG

As we mentioned in the first lesson of this tutorial, the JPEG format provides a balance between image quality and file size, which makes it a good choice for web sharing. If your image isn't already using this format, we recommend saving a new JPEG version to share online.

Resize when needed

Many photo-sharing services, such as Facebook, will resize images automatically when you upload them. If you're using a service like this, you probably won't need to worry about resizing your images manually.

However, if you're not using a service like this, you'll likely want to resize the image to suit your needs. Most modern digital cameras take large, high-resolution images, which will have much more detail than you actually need for online sharing. Resizing will allow you to dramatically reduce the file size. For example, take a look at this photo (it should open in a new browser tab or window—click the image to view it at full size). This image is 4608px by 3072px and 4.5MB (4500KB).

By comparison, take a look at the resized versions of the same image below:

• 400px by 267px, 22KB. This is a relatively small version of the image. You might use this for decoration next to some text on a webpage or document. 
  
  

• 800px by 533px, 60KB. This is a relatively large version of the image. You might use this as a featured image on a webpage or document.
  
  

While the 800px version has a slightly larger file size (60KB) than the 400px version (22KB), both of these are much, much, smaller than the original version (4500KB). The 800px version is actually about 99 percent smaller than the original, which will make it easier for people to download and view the image on the Web. But remember, if you want to resize an image you should also keep an original, unedited version of the file. This way, you'll have the full-resolution version if you need to print it or make further edits.

You can review our lesson on Making Basic Adjustments to learn how to resize an image.

The tips above will help your images to look their best when sharing. Again, most online photo-sharing services, including most of those we discussed earlier in this lesson, will resize your images automatically. This is one reason these services are so popular—they make it easy to share great-looking photos without a lot of effort.