Resize Images: Before Uploading To Your Site

Often the simple things cause people to have the most problems, how to resize images for example. In this blog post I am going to explain why you need to resize images and how to do it simply using a free tool.

Why Resize Images?

The reason you need to resize images before uploading is simple. They will be too big and therefore make your website load slower in peoples browsers, and more than likely people will click off your site before it is open. What do you do when a site is taking ages to load, yes click off it.

Most people upload their image without checking the size and then make it smaller on their site by dragging the corner and making the image smaller to fit onto their page. This looks fine but all they have done is changed the dimensions of the image not the actual size of the file. So what we have to do is resize the images before we upload them.

How Do I Resize Images?

I am going to introduce you to a free tool to help you resize images that are too big. First off you need to find out the file size of your image. Right click on the image and click properties at the bottom. You will be able to see the size of your image. You will probably find it is over 1 megabyte which is far too big. The image I am using in the video below is actually 2.75MB which is massive. Using this free tool you are going to be able to reduce the size of the image to 25 -35 kilobytes as opposed to over 2750 kilobytes in my original image.

The tool I am using is called Irfanview, a strange name I know but you can download it for free at http://www.irfanview.com . Once you have downloaded Irfanview double click to open it up. Here is a video that will take you through the process of resizing your image.

As you can see using this free tool will make a big difference to the size of the images you are uploading to your websites or blogs. So now you know you will not be slowing your site down with the images you upload.

I hope you found this resize images post helpful and you found it easy to follow. Now go and practise changing a few of your images before you start uploading to your blog.