For this week’s Photo Tip Thursday, I’ll be taking you back to the digital darkroom {a.k.a. your computer} for a time/space saving tip that will hopefully rock your world. It’s about resizing your images. What I mean by resizing your pictures is shrinking them to the exact dimensions {measured in pixels} that your blog displays them in. For instance, the image size that’s used for A Southern Drawl’s images is 650 {width} x 975 {height} pixels.

For example, straight out of the camera, the image size is around 3648 x 5472 pixels, and file size wise, it’s about 25MB. That’s enormous. The thing is though, if you were to upload this image at this size to you blog, it would only be displayed at 650 x 975 pixels but retain it’s original 25MB file size. That’s a waste of space. Resizing your images means that the file sizes are much, MUCH smaller. After resizing an image to blog dimensions, the file size is reduced to a mere 700 KB. That’s right, I meant kilobytes. That’s 0.028% of the original file size! Crazy right? Because of this, images upload to your blog faster when you’re making your posts, your posts will load much faster when people pull up your blog because there’s less information to load, and it’ll be a ton easier to upload those photos to Dropbox so that you can have them on your phone for your Instagram posts.

If you open up the HTML coding on your blog, you’ll be able to see exactly how wide your images are on your website. Once you find the width that you need to resize your images to, you’ll need to find the corresponding height. Multiply the width by 1.5 to get the proper height so as to maintain the correct aspect ratio for your photos.

650 pixels in width x 1.5 = 975 pixels in height

Once you have these measurements, you can now resize your images. In Lightroom, you’ll find the resizing option in the Export dialogue. What’s really cool is that once you’ve entered the dimensions you want, you can save them as an export preset so that you can apply it to future exports without having to re-enter the values and settings that you’ve applied.

With Lightroom, you can select all of the photos that you want to export at once, then resize them in the export dialogue saving you a ton of time.

In Photoshop Elements/Photoshop, click the “Images” tab and scroll down to where it says “Image Size” and click. Enter the dimensions that you want and click “OK”. It’s a little more time consuming because you’ll have to do it to all of your images one at a time, but it can be done. This is why I prefer using Lightroom for all of my photo edits.

That’s it! Now you’ll have smaller image sizes {and file sizes} custom suited for your blog’s needs.