Photos Tell the Story – When Done Right!

Photos are worth a thousand words, as they say.  But, on a website, photos can add to the visitor’s experience, or become a source of irritation.  In some instances, your photos can even cause your visitors to go elsewhere, and you’re going to lose a potential lead.

Critical Issues for Online Photos

There are two things that must be done to a photograph in order to make it work effectively on your website or your blog.

1. The photo must be well-exposed.  I am constantly amazed at the number of black boxes I see on websites and MLS listings that purport to advertise a home.  It sounds silly, I suppose, but if your photo is nothing but a black background with a window in it, you shouldn’t use it.
2. The size of the file that contains the photo must be reasonable.  Reasonable means small.  Keep in mind that you can reduce the size that is displayed on your website without reducing the size of the file itself.  Extremely large files take an extremely long time to load, and that’s where you can lose your site visitors!

Free Online Tools for Photo Editing

If you have photo editing software, you’re all set.  Figure out how to change the display size, brightness and contrast, and how to reduce the size of the file itself.

If you don’t have photo editing software, there are a host of websites on the Internet that can be used to make sure your photos are working for you.  Do a search on any search engine for online photo editing, and you’ll find a long list of websites to check out.

Here’s What You Can Accomplish with Free Online Photo Editing

You can go from this:

To this:

… in just a minute or two.

Learn How the Photos Above were Edited Using Online Tools

If you’re taking photos with a digital camera, you’ll need to determine what setting is best for website photos.  If you use the highest setting, your photo files will start out extremely large, and you’ll often find it difficult to use the online tools to get them down to a good size for the web.

I started with the “bad” photo that was 1000×750 px.  I used the editor at www.Pixenate.com to do the initial editing.  After uploading the photo, I resized it to 200 px wide, and used the “Fill Light” button several times to adjust the image until I was happy with the brightness of the photo.

I saved that photo.  It looked good, and it displayed at the desired size, but the size of the file was still too large – 25KB.

So, I went to www.Webresizer.com.  Actually, once you’ve read the introduction, you can go to http://www.webresizer.com/resizer/ - that link gets you directly to the Resizer.

I uploaded the photo I’d edited in Pixenate, and the WebResizer automatically resized the file to 7.25KB.  Now, that’s a reasonable file size for a photo that big!

I saved the resized photo, and I was set to go!  It really only takes a minute or two, and it will make your website, listing or blog look great!

The only other tip I have is to establish a file naming convention before you start.  For example, this illustrates names you could use for the various files:

• Original File Name:  JoeSmithLivingRoom.jpg  (the one coming right from your camera)
• File Name after Using Pixenate:  JoeSmithLivingRoomP.jpg
• File Name after Using WebResizer:  JoeSmithLivingRoomPW.jpg

That way, you’ll always know which file is which.  You could simply save the file under the same name, replacing the file each time.  I’m just too paranoid to do that.  If something happened where I wanted the photo in a different format, I’ve learned from personal experience,  that it really helps to have the original available!

Enjoy!