What is the best file size for pics in a website photo gallery?
 

Hey folks!
I'm slowly adding images to my websites' photo gallery. My question is, what is the optimal size for thumbnails/images?

Thanks!

I think it depends on who is going to view the gallery. I still have relatives on dialup, so I try to keep the thumbnails at < 2 KB and the photos < 100 KB.

if you are going for visual appeal, I would say 3 to 4 pictures in a row with a buffer on all sides
(page_width - (buffer * (number_of_photos + 1))) / number_of_photos

so for 3... photos with a space of 20px and a page width of 800px. it would be about 250px width for each picture.

Current layout is pretty good, but I wouldn't enlarge photos under cursor - it takes additional time to load larger pictures.
Ideally, users with 800x600 monitors should be able to view your gallery without too much scrolling. If you'll keep that in mind, choosing size will be easy.

Thanks guys!
I think 'pljvaldez' hit it on the head concerning what I'm refering to.
Can I create an image of 100kb, and still have it be whatever size that I choose in pixels?

Within certain limits, yes. You can compress more, reduce the number of colors and probably a few other things that I can't think of right now. But that will always be trial and error.

Yes. Either play with "jpeg quality" (for photos), or save images as palletized png (only text, monochrome images, line drawings and pictures with small numbers of colors, for photos it won't look very good).
Reducing quality of jpegs from 100% to 95% ("progressive" jpeg) gives significant change in size (95% image will be much smaller) without many noticeable artifacts. Even 75% quality will look very good.

I seem to recall during a web development lesson I took years ago that the magic number for resolution was something like 75 ppi for viewing on computer monitors. Of course, that was in the 15" CRT days that maybe got 1024 x 768 resolution...

Picasa Web album converts everything to jpg with default photo size of about 250KB in full viewing mode. This appears to be a very decent size for most pictures. Perhaps this is something for you to go by?

Why bother with it when you can do same with GIMP?

Lots of ideas, thank you!

It so happened that I had just installed Picasa for Linux and uploaded some 500 photos of various formats, and all were converted to jpg, with average size of about 250KB. The thumbnails were about 7KB (150x150px)

I am sure there may be better ways of doing this.

murthy

Okay, valid argument, in this case it makes sense.