Many do not realize that photos have a physical size and also a size based on the number of pixels and storage space they require. Images used online should be reduced to low resolutions (low res). The easy way to do this is using a free program called GIMP. (Download GIMP free here – click “show other downloads” to find the Mac and Windows versions.)
How to Scale Images
- Point at the image and save it to your hard drive using “save image as”. Rename it to be descriptive of what is in the photo while you are saving it.
- Open the image in GIMP.
- Click Image, scale image.
- Change the width to what will fit in the blog you’re using. The image above is scaled to 520. If your blogging area is narrower, try 480. DO NOT unlink the width and height or you will distort the image.
- Set the X and Y resolutions to 72 pixels/in (72 dpi).
- Click Scale.
How to Reduce Image File Size
- Click File, Save As, and either rename the file or write over the original (only if you’re certain you did it correctly and no longer need the original, larger image).
- If you save the image as a .jpg it is easy to make it smaller. Most image types can be resaved as .jpg including .png and .gif.
- Click Show preview in image window (see image) and the pop-up will tell you the file size of the image. Move the image quality by either sliding the bar or reducing the number. Point at the image to move it out from under the pop-up so you can see it as you reduce the size. Do not click save yet.
- Make it as small as possible without distorting the image. Text only images can be made very small as shown in this example. The second image in this post is only 8.7 kb now. You can see this by right clicking on the image and clicking view image info. (The exact wording may vary depending on browser and operating system.)
- Once you are happy with the file size and clarity of the image then click Save.
Best Image Sizes for Blogs
Whether you prefer a large, rectangular image across the top of a post or a smaller more square image with text wrapped around it is a personal preference. A more square image will automatically display best on the home page. If you use larger, rectangular images in your blog posts you may have to make a separate thumbnail image to appear on the home page. Otherwise, only the center of the image will appear and any text may be truncated (cut off).
The larger images are better for pinterest. (Tall images work best on pinterest, but are not generally best for the top of a blog post.) When you have a post you feel may do well, take the time to create an image with compelling wording to use on sites like Pinterest and to appear on Facebook and Google Plus.
Images in blog posts should be under 60 kb whenever possible. If you use more than one image in a post make them as small as you can without making them hard to read. Some infographics or detailed images may have to be more than 60 kb.
For more details on using images in posts, see:
- Common Blogging Mistakes: Editorial Guidelines for Bloggers
- 43+ Free Blog Images Sources: Where to Get Royalty Free Photos
If you need assistance learning to use GIMP, contact me on Skype (username growmap; Skype phone number 214-444-6247).
Gail Gardner
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Thanks for sharing .I was getting confused on how to do this .It helped a lot.
Finaly! I love Gimp and all free things. 🙂 I work with Photoshop few years but Gimp is much better.
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Hi Zeljko,
GIMP is so much easier to use than Photoshop. Even if I bought Photoshop I’d rather use GIMP.
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Very interesting article by reducing the image resolution that would make the blog loading more faster
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What a great tutorial! I really like in such tutorial now now really hope that I will able to reduce image by using GIMP. Thanks for this vital post.
Great post Gail. I have been placing photos in my blog posts using other programs. I will give GIMP a try. It looks promising and as you say it’s free. Thanks for the info.
This is so funny I just installed GIMP over the weekend and then I came onto this site looking at social media tips and then came across this article. I always find it so weird that you never heard of something and once you then read one thing about it you then end up seeing it everywhere.
Thanks for the tips I will try this out when I start using this program this week.
Just one tip – the resolution doesn’t really matter for for online images. It really only comes into play if you are going to print the image. The resolution is useful if you want to ensure the quality of your picture for the on screen size. If you are using a full width blog you might want to consider larger images but you have to weigh the importance of image quality versus load times.
Hi Bill,
The resolution absolutely matters because you want images to load as quickly as possible and hi-res images fill up your database and take many times longer to load. You only want hi-res for print. Online images should NEVER be hi-res unless you have some speciality site selling them or you are in radiology or have some other purpose that required the highest resolution.
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Fantastic read, I changed template on our blog and after that the rankings had a huge slide
Will surely be coming back, its a great site!
I am just getting started with using Gimp, so thanks for that handy workout, my next problem is resizing the canvas without scaling the image as well, but im getting there.
Minimizing pictures could assist in improving the running moment of the website. There is also a plugin named WP Smush. it that allows compress photos.
Bloggers often need to reduce the image size of pictures they put up with their posts to save disk space and GIMP is one of the best, and most importantly free, tools available to achieve these results very quickly.
Yes GIMP is very good tool, and resulution will stay as it was before.
It looks great to reduce image sizes… It will also save us lot of disk space.. 🙂
Gimp is really very good software for image editing. It has almost many features similar to adobe photoshop.
Reducing images could help to improve the loading time of the blog. There is also a plugin called WP Smush.it that helps compress images.
Downloaded and used it, perfect piece of software which was much needed. Thanks for sharing and good luck
Hi Gail
Nice post…I have used this GIMP software for reducing the images size and it really works very well…it does not alter the image quality much and helps to reduce the size that probably saves disk space and also helps to decrease the downloading time of the blog page too..
Thanks for sharing
Keep posting
Well nice one as reducing image is not only good for blogging site but for every site which have images on it could be live stream or it could be e cart.
I agree with you Gail !
Resizning images can help to reduce the size of images and will help us to save disk- space. I use Gimp on my windows computer and have been using the same functionality fro my blog posts . Anyways, thanks for sharing this tutorial with us .
-Pramod
I was using Nxpowerlite for the same purpose and it also proved useful for me and it has helped me to save a lot of GB.
Hi Alia,
Yes, there are many programs that are useful for reducing images, but many bloggers are still using too many large images in their posts. I wrote this while I was downloading, editing, and readding images in a recent guest post.
Page load time is critical for better rankings and to keep people on your pages, so bloggers need to know how to reduce images – and what sizes work best in blogs.