Anyone care to share their experience with images and what is the max. file size full size images should be? I've really wrested with this question as my store sells art (European Folk Art to be exacty) and images are everything. For all intensive purposes, I’m “selling” the images I put up on the site. Customers will buy my image not from the description or the country of origin – it’s all image. The better the image – the higher they chances of sale. I have to images that show the detail and sometimes, even different camera angles.

This leads me to my question - what is the right balance for image size and image quality? Or rather, how big can an image file size be before people will somply click out? If I make the image too small it compromises the quality and I lose detail - hence no sale. If I make it too big, dialup customers move right along - again, no sale.

Any help or ideas would be greatly appreciated…


Best,
Brian @ Saxon Gifts

Your question raises one that has been on my mind. Just what percentage of Internet users are now on dsl or some other form of fast connection? When most folks get connected to broadband technologies, image size won't matter much. How close are we to that ideal state? Anyone have the statistic?

Perhaps the real statistic we need is the percentage of people who are Internet shoppers who now have broadband connections.

Hi Brian,

I've worked with a graphic designer on my site and we've come up with using 400px across as the max dimensions for a large image. We use .jpg files with a quality compression of about 50% which seems to leave enough detail in the images, and keep them small enough to load quickly. I would play around with it and see what works best for your products.

If you're photoshop or other imaging program savvy you can do multiple images within a single image, one of the entire piece, and a cutout of a section of the piece with more detail. This is something we're going to implement but as the time requirement is high for each picture we haven't done this yet. And will probably leave it for the more expensive pieces.

Hope that helps,
www.DetailsArt.com

The two image sizes you should use as a default for the carts are 70 pixels wide for thumbnails and 450 pixels wide or less for your product pages.

Now since this post is more conscious of size you might want to write some custom html and place it in your Description field in your Product editor for the particular product you are working on. In this custom html provide a link for an even bigger image stating: "If you would like to see a full size image of this picture Click Here!" Then link up the Click Here to your larger image and make sure you have _blank as the target in the <href> tag that way it will pop open a new window and won't take the viewer out of your site.

Good luck!!

Hello saxongifts,

In spending a few hours playing around with picture size, this is what I have come up with.

Thumbnails no more than 150X150, JPG format, saved at 70% quality. This is what I currently running on my site. Works well with 3 or 4 items across the page. If you only have 2 items across the page maybe increase you size to 175X175 and cut down on the quality maybe to 50%-60%. My thumbnails are sitting between 4K-9K.

The enlarged pictures I find for me 300X300, JPG format, saved at 50%-60%. Again what I am on my site, most picture are 10K-16K.

These sizes I have tested on dial up and seem to work wee. Shouldn't make your customers run to the next site. Rigth away anyway!

Also what I would recommend is set your diaply to 800X600 and then take a look at your site and pictures and make any necessary adjustments from there. There are still tons of people using that resolution.

Hope that helps.

A great resource for finding out Internet industry trends is http://www.echoecho.com. Check it out!

The most important thing to remember is it has to look good in a 800 x 600 pixel screen. The majority of internet users use this so you have to look good to them and not just to people that use higher screen resolutions.

So if you are using large product images make sure they don't look too big on the 800 x 600 screen size.

Hi Classy,

I'm glad you like the CC logos :-)

To manage the left side go to: 'Site HTML' and then 'Navigation Bar Editor'

It's just a small piece of HTML (really just the picture) that we cut and pasted in editor. The logo we grabbed from Verisign website I believe (they're there for us to use). Or try Amex, or Visa. They should have them as well.

Good Luck!
DetailsArt