Pretty as a Picture: Blog Photos Made Easy
April 17th, 2011

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Pictures are worth a thousand words, or so they say. As fashion bloggers, we use photos in our posts almost every day — outfit pictures, shopping hauls, and our favorite editorial spreads grace the pages of our blogs.

It may seem straightforward to simply plop a picture into a post, but there’s so much more to blog photos. For this week’s Better Blogging post, I want to focus on image quality, optimizing your photos and tools that will make it all a breeze.

Contents

Quick Tip: Clicking a section link below will scroll the page to the relevant section.

• Camera Settings
• Photo Size
• File Types
• Save For Web
• Image SEO
• Hosting Your Images
• Editing Images
• Tools & Resources

Camera Settings

Getting to know your camera will be one of your saving graces. Many people purchase a high-end DSLR and don’t use it to it’s full potential! Think of it like someone buying a Ferrari and never driving faster than 35 MPH. Every digital camera has a different menu layout, so refer to your user manual for guidance. Below are two examples of common settings menus, from the Nikon D5000 and a Nikon Coolpix camera.

Resolution

Resolution is basically size of the photo. Digital images are made of pixels, and the more pixels, the higher the resolution! Most cameras offer three or more resolution options, so be sure to choose the right size for your blog. Say, if your blog’s content width is 700, choose a resolution larger than that so you’ll end up with a nice, beautiful photo that you can resize downward to fit.

Quality

Your quality setting will determine how big the file size is. Now, many cameras — especially point-and-shoot — will combine the resolution AND quality into one setting. For many DSLRs, the options are separate. It’s best to choose medium or higher for quality, so your photos aren’t pixely before you even get a chance to resize them. Don’t be afraid to fill up your memory card! You can always take care of compressing and resizing later.

Optical Zoom vs. Digital Zoom

OK, so you might be wondering what the optical zoom versus digital zoom on your camera is. Basically, pretend that digital zoom doesn’t exist. It results in such low quality photos it’s not even worth using. See below:

Photo Size

Dealing with photo size on blogs is one of the biggest issue I tend to come across. So, how do you handle resizing?

WordPress makes things very easy for you to control image size before and during upload. Prepare ahead of time by going into your Settings –>Media to set the max size of your uploaded images. This will prevent any rogue, super-huge photos. For large, it’s best to set this to the width of your content area:

While uploading, you can choose what size to insert into your post — you might not want something the full content width! I like to insert images at content width, so if I decide to change the width later, I can do so in the code afterwards.

Blogger really doesn’t offer such precise options, but you can control image size easily! Once you upload an image, go into the HTML view (if you don’t write there usually) and find the image code. See the section that says “s780″ here? 780 is the width of that image currently. If you want to change the width, you can simply change that number — s700 for 700 pixels wide, for example:

If that makes you nervous, you have another option! You can simply use the width="" attribute. Be sure to delete the old width and height attributes, and add your own width.

No matter what platform you’re on, width="" will resize any image to the proper width. Be sure to include the size, like this: width="700".

File Types

This is pretty straightforward: .jpg, .png, and .gif are your possible image files you’ll be using.

• .jpg = Standard image format.
• .png = Format good for graphics, or images with transparent elements.
• .gif = Great for teeeensy icons or animated photo files.

A Note on RAW

For the more advanced photographer, you’ll want to shoot in RAW, as opposed to JPG. Simply put, RAW wins over JPG. RAW is exactly what your camera sees, and JPG is processed in the camera. And the camera doesn’t always guess correctly. Initially, RAW images look flat and dark, but that’s because they’re unprocessed — all of the data is available for you to tweak. JPGs look better out of the camera, but much of the photo’s data is lost, so you can only do so much in post-processing.

The one caveat: You must use software that can develop RAW files, like Adobe Lightroom. It takes time to learn — I know I still need a lot more practice!

SLR Lounge has a wonderful article that sums this up perfectly.

Save For Web

Not everyone has super-speedy Internet, but really it doesn’t matter either way — you want your blog to load as fast as possible. Optimizing your images for web will help with this! I’ve noticed that most bloggers don’t insert a jump into their posts, so whole posts load on the front page. Another reason you want images that load quickly! This is where “save for web” comes to the rescue. In my examples below I’m using Photoshop, but most image editors will give you similar options:

1. Quality: There is no hard and fast rule for the quality setting — it all depends on the photo! Anywhere from 75 to 90 works well. You don’t want the quality to be so low that the photo looks pixely, and you don’t want a file size that’s too big — it’s all about balance. Basically, you want to shoot for an file size of 200K and under (see #4).
2. Optimized: Keep optimized checked.
3. Image Size: You can resize the image here, if you’d like!
4. File Size: Here’s where you can see what the file size will be — remember, 200K or under is what you’re shooting for.

Image SEO

I’ve touched on this subject before in my SEO post, but I’ll review it quickly! Search engines can’t “see” images, so you have to clue them in on what’s there. Adding an alt attribute takes care of that. A good alt attribute is something that describes the image in a few keywords — your photos will have a better chance of showing up in image searches, too! This is how it should look:

If you want an easy fix — and you’re on a self-hosted WordPress install — there’s a plugin that takes care of image SEO: SEO Friendly Images will automatically add an alt and title attribute to your images, based on the plugin settings.

Hosting Your Images

This is a huge one, for me. Rather, a huge pet peeve. It makes me sad inside when I see someone’s photos not there because their photo hosting failed. And I see it a lot. What are your options?

Self-hosting

If you have your own hosting, this is the best option. You might not realize it, but when you purchase hosting for a website, it also comes with usable space for things like photos and other files! You can access and upload photos via FTP, either web-based or desktop software. FTP stands for File Transfer Protocol, and is how you upload files into a server. For example, GoDaddy has a web-based FTP client for managing files.

I use desktop FTP software, and my favorite is Coda. It’s for Mac, and it’s not free ($99), but I absolutely LOVE it to pieces — I use it as my text editor for coding and for file transferring/previews. I could go on, but I’ll stop drooling. If you want a nice, free option, Filezilla (Mac and PC) works well for straight up FTP stuff.

Blog Upload

Some people choose to upload their photos elsewhere, but why not right into your blog platform?

WordPress.com

For WordPress.com users, you can upload up to 3GB of stuff, and with optimized photo files, that’s a lot! It’s also super-easy — just upload, insert, and post! You can even go back into your media section to manage your files.

Blogger

You can upload your photos via Blogger, too! Did you know that when you upload photos through Blogger, they’re actually uploaded to Picasa? YES! It’s awesome.

Picasa

Ah, Picasa. I really love Picasa for a free photo hosting option. It’s powered by Google (I know, I’m such a Google fangirl), and it’s tied right into your Blogger. All of your Blogger photos will already be in their own album!

With Picasa you get 1GB of free storage for photos and videos. It sounds small at first, but photos smaller than 800×800 pixels don’t count towards this limit! This means you can upload and store unlimited photos at 800×800 or smaller for free! If you need more space, Picasa offers 20GB for only $5/year, which is an AMAZING deal — that’s less than $0.50/month, and one of the cheapest options around.

You have two ways to manage your photos with Picasa: Via web or desktop software. And it all syncs up, so you have access to your photos everywhere. You can edit photos in your Picasa desktop software, or via Picnik in the web version.

Picasa also makes it very easy to grab your photo link or code snippet to add into your posts. You can even post to Blogger directly from Picasa:

Imgur

After Picasa, Imgur (pronounced like imager), is my favorite free photo hosting option — great privacy options, great uptime. They offer unlimited uploads, but your photos must have at least 1 view every 6 months or they may be deleted. The fix for this is their Pro account. If you want to upgrade, it’s only $23.95/year, which works out to only $1.99/mo, and it’s one of the best deals out there for third-party hosting.

Flickr

I currently use Flickr for hosting my nicer photography stuff, but I’ll be switching over to Imgur over time. With Flickr, there are limits for the free account, and I hit them pretty quickly — 300 MB for a monthly photo upload limit is not ideal for my usage! Flickr’s Pro option is $24.95/year, which works out to about $2.07/mo.

Photobucket

I’m only mentioning Photobucket because I have to! I guess I’m a bit biased about them because I’ve never had a good experience — and I see them down a LOT. Photobucket is free and they offer unlimited storage for non-commercial use, but they cap your bandwidth, AKA, if you get lots of views they can cut you off. There’s a Pro option at $24.95/year that removes the caps for bandwidth and storage.

Editing Images

Just like hosting options, there are tons of options for editing your photos!

Photoshop

Photoshop is my editing tool of choice. It takes a bit of practice to start using, but it’s an incredibly powerful tool. It’s not cheap though: $699 for your first version and $199 as an upgrade. I mainly use the Adobe Creative Suite 5 Master Collection for work, so I can justify the purchase of software like this.

Photoshop.com

If you’re looking for something simpler, Photoshop.com offers a great web-based editor — Photoshop Express Editor!

GIMP

If you want something similar to Photoshop’s functionality, GIMP is a wonderful substitute. It’s free, does almost everything Photoshop can, and is a good way to teach yourself the ins and outs of advanced photo editing.

Picasa

Again, Picasa has a useful, simple photo editing tool accessible desktop software.

Picnik

Hooray for Picnik! You have the option to use Picnik through Picasa or on it’s own at picnik.com. It’s one of the best web-based image editors out there. You can’t do anything too complex, but it gets the job done.

UPDATE 01/21/2012: Picasa just announced that they will be shutting down April 19, 2012 — how sad! I really did enjoy using Picasa while away from home/Photoshop. I know some of my fellow bloggers favored Picasa for photo editing, so many will have to find other services. The links below include a variety of services that commenters on this post suggested as well! You can export your photos from Picnik and take advantage of their Premium service for free until they close their doors. For those who subscribed to their Premium service, expect an email and refund!

Tools & Resources

• SLR Lounge’s rundown of RAW vs. JPG.
• Photoshop.com’s Express Editor
• More info on Adobe Photoshop CS5.
• GIMP: Free, open-source, cross-platform image editing software similar to Photoshop.
• Picnik: Free web-based image editing.
• SEO Friendly Images WordPress plugin
• Coda: My FTP software of choice.
• Filezilla: Free FTP client for PC or Mac.
• Picasa: Google’s application for image editing, photo management and uploading. Web-based and desktop software available.
• Imgur: Free, web-based image editing and hosting.
• Flickr: Free, web-based image hosting.
• Photobucket: Free, web-based image editing and hosting.
• File Transfer Planet has a great beginner’s guide to FTP.
• BeFunky: Free photo effects and photo editing.
• Pixlr: Free photo effects and photo editing.

Sophie Catface sez, "If you liek dis post, plz consider sharing, leaving a comment or subscribing to teh RSS feed to have future articles delivered to your feed readerz. You can even follow my mommeh on Twitter @kristin. TANKS!"