A Newbie's Guide To JPEG Compression

by

Freeballer

Our motto for the day is
"A Sign Up Saved, Is a Sign Up Earned"

With that in mind, lets get to it. First things first, it's best to remove your underwear and get some kickass music crankin' when you are doing JPEG compression! More importantly though, BACKUP YOUR CONTENT before you start!!! If the content you purchased is on CD, it's not a problem. However, if it's downloaded content that's just sitting on your hard drive, it would be wise to back it up to write-protectable media(CDR, floppy, zip disk etc) before you start making thumbs, compressing for file size etc. Just because you are compressing your new images for what you are doing now, doesn't mean you won't want the full size versions later and if you happen to batch process your thumbs and overwrite your large images...well you get the idea.

Your purchased content will vary widely in dimension and file size. I have seen as big as 2000x1300 and 1.5MB per pic!! That's just a little larger than what we would like :). Generally speaking, you want your pics to be roughly 500 pixels on the long side with a file size of 30kb or less. Thumbnails average around 110 pixels on the long side and around 3kb in file size. These numbers are just a guideline, different strokes for different folks. Some pics compress better than others. As a rule of thumb, if the sum of my image files for a 20 pic free site is under 500kb, then I can live with that although that would be pretty high for a TGP gallery that is going to be getting a ton of traffic. Use your judgement. If you would like a good comparison of how you can compress the file size of an image and still retain good image quality, Click Here. Ok put your underwear back on because we are going to do some math(taking them off really doesn't help anyway, I just wanted to see if you would do it).

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