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Image compression is vital for two reasons;
- To make the most our of your allocated web hosting space
- To make the download time for your website pages shorter.
Essentially the aim is to reduce the file size of the image by compressing it in photo editing software, but critically there is a trade off between quality and file size. There are a great number of programs out there that can resize or resample your images as well as compressing them in a variety of formats. .jpg is the most common for web pictures, however, .png is becoming more popular for high quality images as broadband internet connections make file size less important.
In this era of videos and rich media websites, images aren’t the biggest user of bandwidth anymore. Video streaming or hosting can be a killer for bandwidth and disk space, effective compression is vital for video files. Websites like youtube offer a great free service for hosting videos online, and you can embed them in your website to save on your hosting costs. If you want to retain complete control over your media, you must host it yourself. Compression of video isn’t a small topic and also isn’t easy to cover in a few paragraphs.
Microsoft include a very good video editor as part of Windows, this can output files in a variety of formats and importantly can compress your video based on a set of “best fit” settings. So even if you have no experience in video editing, you can easily compress your videos for the web.
Searching on google will yeild many tools and forums out there that can offer advice on video compression, if you put in the effort and learn about the various codecs out there, you can get better quality videos for the same file size.
Compatibility is also vital, you don’t want to use an obscure video format that will require end users to have to download a codec to play your video. Embeded flash players eliminate this problem, but it also relies upon the user having flash installed on their computer, but most people do have flash installed, as most of the “everyday” websites that people visit will use flash in some part.
As with most things, research is key, spend some time learning about what is possible, it will be worth it in the long run, or if it is easier, just use youtube.
- To make the most our of your allocated web hosting space
- To make the download time for your website pages shorter.
Essentially the aim is to reduce the file size of the image by compressing it in photo editing software, but critically there is a trade off between quality and file size. There are a great number of programs out there that can resize or resample your images as well as compressing them in a variety of formats. .jpg is the most common for web pictures, however, .png is becoming more popular for high quality images as broadband internet connections make file size less important.
In this era of videos and rich media websites, images aren’t the biggest user of bandwidth anymore. Video streaming or hosting can be a killer for bandwidth and disk space, effective compression is vital for video files. Websites like youtube offer a great free service for hosting videos online, and you can embed them in your website to save on your hosting costs. If you want to retain complete control over your media, you must host it yourself. Compression of video isn’t a small topic and also isn’t easy to cover in a few paragraphs.
Microsoft include a very good video editor as part of Windows, this can output files in a variety of formats and importantly can compress your video based on a set of “best fit” settings. So even if you have no experience in video editing, you can easily compress your videos for the web.
Searching on google will yeild many tools and forums out there that can offer advice on video compression, if you put in the effort and learn about the various codecs out there, you can get better quality videos for the same file size.
Compatibility is also vital, you don’t want to use an obscure video format that will require end users to have to download a codec to play your video. Embeded flash players eliminate this problem, but it also relies upon the user having flash installed on their computer, but most people do have flash installed, as most of the “everyday” websites that people visit will use flash in some part.
As with most things, research is key, spend some time learning about what is possible, it will be worth it in the long run, or if it is easier, just use youtube.