Cutting your images down to size

The pictures from the camera (left), around 0.9 MB each, reduced to under 10 kb (right)

Someone asked this at a seminar I gave last month: don't the images you upload on to your blog quickly take up all your available space?

If you are using Blogger, you've in fact got 300 MB of space for images, so you do have quite a lot of room. If you're using something else, like your school's own server, for example, you might run into problems quicker.

There are two things you can do to trim the size of the images you are uploading:

1. Adjust the settings on your camera (assuming, that is that you are using a digital camera to create your own images) -- so that the resolution is low and the size of the images small
2. Edit the images using an image editor -- like Photoshop or Fireworks, Gimp (which is free) or Picasa (also free)

The images in the illustration at the top of this post were taken on a good digital camera, on which the settings had not been altered. By editing the images with Fireworks, however, reducing the resolution and cutting the size of the images to 200px by 200px, the saving was enormous, as you can see.