Images in Wordpress my way

Lots of talk recently about image sizes and resizing etc. How to reduce file size and so on.

For what it’s worth I will show you what I do. There might be slicker ways of doing it but I know this way works, its controllable from the outset and you know what you are going to get even before it goes into Wordpress and you can reuse the finished images in another post.

I use PowerPoint for most of my work. I know there are different drawing packages but I’ve used it for 20 years now and know the software inside out.

Let’s say I have a photo on my camera, perhaps 5Mb in size and I want to use it in a post on my website.

First thing you need to know is that when you first import a picture into Wordpress, the re-size box in Wordpress is 10cm by 10cm. Any picture smaller than 10 by 10 will have lots of white space around it.

I make a 10cm by 10 cm square on my blank page in Powerpoint, import my 5Mb photo and re-size and crop it to at least fit into the 10x10 square. This is my target space to fill.

I will create a separate page for every photo I want to use, all at least 10x10, some may be 15x10 and so on, but I try to avoid any dimension being less than 10cm and thus avoid white space. You can recolour the photo, adjust contrast, resize etc. add text or arrows to it and get the image exactly as you want it.

It is then a simple matter of saving the powerpoint images as jpegs which will now only be a few kb in size. When you are ready to put them into your posts, they will fill the resize box in Wordpress quite nicely and not leave any white space. You already know what they are going to look like and it's very very quick to do.

Hope this helps

Bux