Be Careful Adding Images to Your Blog That Are Too Big!

Courtesy Library of Congress 200×247 pixels-23KB file size.

I recently had a client contact me about an error message he was getting when trying to upload an image and a PDF to his site. He’s an author about to publish a book on the life and times of Mark Twain and how he has been influenced by Mr. Samuel Clemons. Read along to find out what the problem was and why what he was trying to do could hurt him in more ways than one.

The image he was trying to upload was a picture of his book cover, both front and back. We were not able to fully duplicate his issue and the error message he got that mentioned a problem with memory, which shouldn’t be an issue due to way our servers are set up. After talking this over with a server administrator, who said he saw no issues with our server, here is what I said…

“The problem with the Twain Book Cover image that you were trying to upload is that it is WAY too big! 3408×2556 pixels is 3.4 times the width of your site. That file’s purpose was clearly for printing the book cover, not showing it online.

It’s also 2.15 megabytes, which will take a while to render on uploads and would certainly take forever to download. That may cause a bad user experience and Google penalties. (See Get More Feedback form Google below)

The file is also high-resolution at 300 dpi, which is about 4x the resolution of web browsers. The standard most use is images set to 72 dpi (max web resolution) and 96 dpi, which gives you a bit more resolution if someone prints the page.

We usually strive for images of 10-15KB for “headshots.” (7KB is often possible) Content images can often be 50KB or less and the biggest images we use all have to be less than 100KB. The image you were trying to upload was 22 times our acceptable maximum. Continue reading →