On 2015-12-31, Ed Huntress wrote:
FWIW, my 60 Mb Internet connection downloads the largest of those
photos in a little less than two seconds.

The image size issue is something we wrestle with all the time in
online magazines. At Fab Shop, we use an underlying PDF file, so our
photos are JPEG-compressed like hell.

What I do in most places, like my project pages, is that I provide
thumbnails of decent quality, like 400x400. They link to pictures of
very good quality (loosely defined).

My ebay pictures are about 500 kb.

There are two schools of thought: One is to juggle things to try to
accomodate people with slow connections. The other is, if they have a
slow connection, it's not worth it to lower quality for everyone else
just to accomodate the others. If your intended readers are serious
businesspeople, they almost certainly have the fastest connection that
they can get. Surveys in the publishing business have indicated this.

You presented facts that lead an inescapable conclusion, that it is
more important to provide details to (most) people, who can afford
good connections, rather than accommodate the remaining few who have a
slow connection.

Thumbnails, generally, alleviate this dilemma.

Iggy's photos look like they're straight out of the camera (16 MP) and
highest-quality JPEG, at around 5 MB, which is typical for the very
slight JPEG compression that most cameras apply internally. Ig, you
can squash the file size down a lot by using a medium-quality JPEG
compression in Photoshop, GIMP, or whatever you use,, while leaving
the image size alone. As it is, I can count the veins in the maple
leaves on the ground. That's a little more than you need. g You
really have to stomp on photos like that with lower-quality JPEG
settings before you notice it.

This is wrong.

You may not need to see the veins on leaves on the ground, but there
may be a model number,m serial number or some such, that you may want
to zoom in. How many holes, shape of holes etc, comes up for many
pictures and a good picture saves the viewer and publisher a lot of
time.


FWIW, for full-width magazine spreads, I typically run the JPEGS at
around 3,000 - 4,000 pixel width, with compression that results in
around 1.5 MB file size. They don't look much different than the
results that then come out of the PDF squeeze machine, which are much
smaller, and they have plenty of sharpness and detail.


This is nice.