It’s important to make sure your image sizes and ratios fit the template or theme you’re working within. Large files can slow down your site significantly, and incorrect ratios will look distorted and misshapen. Make sure your site looks professional with some help from these photo editing apps
While it seems like you would want the highest resolution photos you can find for your website, that’s not necessarily the case. Just as files sizes that are too low-res can look terrible and artifacted, photos that are too high-res can also have a negative effect on your site. Past a certain size (200kb per photo or so), you won’t be able to discern a difference in quality, but what does happen is that the huge file sizes will slow down your site since a browser needs to load them for a visitor to see. The bigger the file (or collection of files), the slower the loading.
If you read our articles you hear us beat this same drum over and over: speed is everything. You have literally only seconds to capture the attention of a visitor—make sure your site is streamlined and efficient by correctly sizing your photos.
Don’t forget to name your photos as well. Photo names are crawled by search engines just like the text on your site is, so for SEO best practices be sure to label them appropriately and with keywords as much as possible.
TL;DR
- Try to keep all image sizes under 200kb and never over 300kb
- Your images almost never need to be wider than 2650px wide for a website
- Name your photos with keywords that are relevant to your page and website
Adobe Photoshop/Lightroom
Hands-down the gold standard for photo editing and graphic design, Adobe Photoshop is an incredibly powerful tool that allows users to do anything they can dream up. However, it is not cheap and is extremely complex. If you’re a professional graphic designer or photographer, it is a must. If you’re just trying to get some images resized or lightly touched up, check out these two free options that work great and will be infinitely less difficult to learn:
Adobe Express
Adobe has been the leader in graphic design apps seemingly forever. Adobe Express is just a super basic free image resizer that makes it all extremely simple. If the only thing you want to do is change the size and ratios of images, this is hands-down the one to use.
- Sign up for the app through Google, Facebook, Apple, or an email address
- Upload your photo
- Specify the size and aspect ratio you want
- Download it back to your computer
That’s it. It has presets for all major social media platforms built-in for ease or custom sizing options if you need.
Befunky
Befunky doesn’t even ask you to create an account to use it. Just click on the “Get started” button, select “Edit a Photo” and you’re in. It has quite a bit more power than the Adobe resizer, but is also more complex and confusing if you’re not familiar with photo editing programs.
- Drag and drop a photo into the editor
- In the tools that open up on the right, select “Resize”
- Change your sizes to whatever you want
- Click the save button at the top and save your file wherever you want to
It is nice to have more photo editing power, though that can also bog you down if you tend to go down the editing rabbit hole. However, if you feel that you do need to change some things in your photos like brightness, color, cropping, etc, Befunky gives you that control for free.
Matthew Ogden is a Minneapolis-based copywriter and content writer and editor. He’s written for national retailers and lobster roll companies alike. When not writing he can be found nose deep in a book, writing and performing music, or nerding out about guitar tone.