A Picture Speaks A Thousand Words
by Stephen Brennan

A very well known and apt adage for many circumstances, but today Im not going to talk about the virtues of a picture in its ability to replace words or describe more effectively. Today, I want to use this space to help those unfamiliar with the ways in which we can make images work for us on the Internet, especially beginner webmasters or those who havent had a lot of practice at using images so they arent a liability to their website.

Unfortunately, for the lack of a bit of knowledge, many webmasters, the uninitiated and some of the relatively experienced, are using images in such a way as to disadvantage themselves and their websites. The most common problem I see is images that are way to big (and I dont mean physical size), which only serves to slow their websites loading time. Ive noticed there are a number of webmasters who either arent aware of the fact that a website is no place for a bitmap image (.bmp) or they dont know how to convert it to a more friendly file.

Firstly, we have to establish the major file types (or file extensions) that are used on websites. These are, as I just mentioned, bitmap (.bmp), which is a MS Windows® format, jpeg (.jpg), gif (.gif) and to a lesser degree png (.png). These initials all have meanings, for instance png stands for Portable Network Graphics but its really of no consequence to name them all.

As I said, except in a very few circumstances, bitmap images have no place on a website, simply because of the size of the file needed to carry them. They certainly have their uses but this isnt generally a recommended use because they can slow the loading speed (the time it takes for a web page to appear on a users screen) to a virtual crawl, unless they are a very small or simple image in terms of color and content.

Other file types can also be too large, especially when the image is a color photograph. Color photos consist of a lot of visual information in order to be photo quality and consequently, even in jpeg format, probably the most popularly used image format on the Net, they can be quite large files. So, you ask, How do I deal with this - what can I do if I have an image that I really want to use, but its too big? No problem.

First, you need a good Image Editor. Its simply a program which can resize, crop (trim), reduce the quality and most importantly, change the file extension (image type) of any image, among many other nifty things. Your standard MS Paint® program is useful, but it has many limitations and is not really good for editing images in the real sense. For my money, which is somewhere around free, you cant go wrong with Irfanview.

Irfanview is an excellent Freeware Image Editor which can be downloaded and installed through their website [url]http://www.irfanview.com[/url]. In my opinion, the only thing it cant do is change the file extension of an animated gif (the moving images that you see everywhere), which I think is beyond almost any program.

Now youre armed with what you need to make your images work for you, instead of you building your website around your images and their foibles. If you have a bitmap image that is 500 Kb, you can turn it into a jpeg of approximately 25 percent of the file size, or even smaller, there are many variables. In some cases, gif and png files can be even smaller than that. You can make the file even more manageable by reducing the quality of the image by, say 10 percent (hardly noticeable in many cases) and cut the file size by up to 30 percent again.

You can crop (trim) edges or parts of the image, which dont need to be shown to reduce file size. You can convert to grayscale (a black and white photo type image) if color isnt too important and save a lot of file size. You can reduce the physical size of the image (although it wont change file size, it can make your images fit where they dont want to), keeping the original ratio of length to width or stretching. You can even capture images (take screenshots).

You can also invert and reverse, turn 90 degrees left or right etc. Basically, if you can conceive of it, within reason, you can do it. So hopefully, now many beginners and budding webmasters wont be a slave to their images any longer, accepting less than they really want because they have to cater for the characteristics of an image. Now the images will speak a thousand words, instead of taking a thousand years to load.

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